In the last video I showed you how I upgraded the T-962 oven to fix some of the issues that were present on this oven. I also mentioned that there is an option to configure a custom reflow profile with this oven and that’s probably something you’re gonna have to use sooner or later because there are so many options of solder paste on the market and not only that but also there is variation between different ovens so it’s likely you’re gonna have to tweak that.
So in this video I’m gonna show you how to define a custom reflow profile in the open source unified engineering firmware. Before doing any actual configuration on the oven you need to start with the specs of your solder paste. For this example let’s assume we are working with the NP545 series from Kester, we need the datasheet of this product to check out the recommended reflow profile. Inside the datasheet we can find the recommended graph, it’s an unusually small one for this paste but luckily we can zoom in and increase the size of the graph.
At this point I recommend you grab a screenshot of this profile and import it into your favorite img editing tool because we need to draw some lines on this graph to extract some values. First I added a scale on the Y axis with a line at each 5 points. Then I added these lines to plot the absolute values on the Y axis. So we now have a set of temperature values for every 30 seconds of the profile but the firmware on the oven, the procedure for inputting a custom reflow profile expects data points every 10 seconds so we need to somehow extrapolate our values to generate more points in between.