Homebrew PCBs

On Monday 03 May 2004 01:23 pm, Stefan Trethan wrote:
> > And how would you suggest doing that?  I'm not talking about a "soldering
> > station" here,  which were still fairly pricey when I was buying this
> > stuff.
> > I'm talking about the *cheap* stuff.  And a reduction in temperature was
> > accomplished by placing a diode in series with the iron,  running it at
> > half power...

> I see... well stations are not much more expensive (maybe 2x to 3x)
> and they are worth the money.

Not these days.  They used to be quite a bit more expensive than they are now.

> You can easily build your own i reckon, it's just a triac and a few other
> parts after all.

Not the ones I'm thinking of -- what you describe sounds pretty much like a 
light dimmer would be,  and I don't see any reason not to use one of those 
rather than going to the trouble of building one,  if you wanted to go that 
way.  But what I was thinking of were the ones that had temperature 
regulation built into them,  where a thermal load on the tip of the iron 
would crank up the heating element a bit,  to maintain proper temperature, 
according to where you had it set.

> Supply it with rectified (and cap. filtered) AC and you get the necessary
> "plus" in power for enabling the control loop to work - so you can still use
> your 110VAC heater.

Control loop?  Where's the feedback portion of it?