I’ve been quite busy over the past few weeks finalising another major project. You may recall me posting an unboxing video for the Weller WXsmart Connected Hand Soldering Platform in the past, but now, the review for the whole set-up is now complete.
Weller has been a trusted name in the soldering business for as long as I can remember. When the chance to review their latest product came around on element14, I was sure not to miss it – after all, I do quite a bit of soldering for work and for my hobby and I think I’m pretty good at it even though I’m not IPC certified.
Nevertheless, the WXsmart soldering station brings together two of my passions in a very interesting way – it’s an IoT soldering station. Thanks to the push towards Industry 4.0, IoT technology has found its way into soldering stations to help manage and track soldering tasks to ensure quality and traceability. If you’re ever building something for a high-reliability client in aerospace, automotive, marine or medical, perhaps your soldering station will tell on you when you’ve done a bad job. At least, that way, potentially defective products don’t go out the door and result in field failures which can be very expensive. Definitely a good thing in-concept.
But more than that, it also comes with the latest smart active tip technology for better response with tip-based memory for recording offsets, calibration date/times, serial numbers and usage hours. The review demo kit was quite extensive, including a number of handpieces, safety rests and accessories.
During the course of the review, I built some ordinary through-hole kits and SMD practice kits, but I also designed and built this based on other SMD Challenge kits.
This is my first time soldering 01005 and 0201 size SMD resistors and I managed just fine! Even better, I did everything lead-free using a variety of alloys including the 95A that was the whole reason I ended up hating lead-free in the first place. The irons were so quick to temperature and held so steady that there was no reason to increase the set-point and soldering lead-free was practically as easy as soldering 60/40 with the slight exception that it was slightly less runny and perhaps a little more grainy.
As part of the review, I did plenty of other stuff which I won’t repeat here, so why don’t you
head on over to element14 Community Forums to read my summary review here or read the individual detailed blogs:
- Weller WXsmart In-Depth Ch1: Market Survey & Feature Introduction
- Weller WXsmart In-Depth Ch2: Unboxing & Design Features
- Weller WXsmart In-Depth Ch3: User Interface & Setup
- Weller WXsmart In-Depth Ch4: Connected Operation & Paid Options
- Weller WXsmart In-Depth Ch5: Usage Scenarios & User Experience
- Weller WXsmart In-Depth Ch6: Performance Tests
- Weller WXsmart In-Depth Ch7: Teardowns & Replacements
or you could watch this unscripted summary video of the review I hastily prepared
