See also all the reflow posts on this weblog: http://news.jeelabs.org/?s=reflow

I’ve done at least a dozen reflows by now, they all worked just fine on my 700W grill with up to 4 JeeNode-size boards. I’m still using leaded solder though, will soon switch to lead-free and raise the temperature by some 20°C.

The main issue is to apply a consistent (small!) amount of solder paste. I’m looking into various stencil options.

I’ve changed the 1µF to 1 10 µF, now on both sides of the VR. Since they are ceramic, I thought maybe no extra 0.1µF decoupling is needed?

As for reprogramming the FTDI, yes that could be a good idea for later – especially once I get to work on some new code to make it easier to manage/upload stuff to JeeLinks and JeeNodes. With multiple units connected, default serial port names are a bit awkward – though the Arduino IDE 0017 helps by supporting multiple serial consoles at once, IIUC.

I’m still debugging the SMD boards – also ordered a magnifying glass with proper lighting.

Another idea: It’s possible to reprogram the EEPROM of the FTDI chips and change things like device ID, device name etc. This could be a nice feature to be able to auto detect JeeLink boards on the host side and not confuse it with a normal FTDI serial port.

-Marius

Apart from that it looks ok to me..

Cheers,

-Marius