Welcome to a new Voltlog, today I’m gonna be showing you what I believe is the Best upgrade that you can do to your Best 863 hot air station and if you remember Voltlog #256. That’s where I did a review of this hot air station, been using it ever since 2019, so that’s about 3 years of service so far, it’s been working great but with the obvious downsides of having this touch screen panel for settings and with the annoying buzzer that you cannot turn off from this standard interface. I mean it takes a lot of button presses even for a simple temperature adjustment and it’s beep beep all the way for every single step.
Well it turns out that someone thought enough is enough and designed a replacement control panel for this station, one that offers a more classic input method through potentiometers for the most important parameters temperature and air speed, offers control over the buzzer but still keeps the touch input if you need to alter any of the other settings and all of this can be ordered as a kit from Tindie which is pretty awesome if you ask me.
If you are interested in ordering your BST-863 hot air station or the upgrade kit which I highly recommend you get for the best experience with this station There will be some links in the description below the video so check them out.
You have two options when ordering this kit from tindie, you can either get it as a KIT which is what I have here or you can get it fully assembled for an extra $10. The Kit version comes with a PCB that has all of the SMT components fully populated but there are a few through hole parts that you will need to solder yourself. I think the author has done a really good job at packing and organizing the different components, Even the resistors come on this little card that shows you where they should be positioned on the PCB. The kit also includes all of the required mounting hardware as well as a sticker for the front panel potentiometers. The package was shipped from Portugal and it got here pretty fast. In fact I’ve had this on my desk for a good while, i’ve just been very busy and unable to install it so far.