Back to primary BLOG BYOB Party #1, "Bring you own Bulbs" - The Internet of Holiday Lights
This is a quick blog to share my experience with trying to solder some WS2812 6pin LED chips onto my custom boards
I have about 14 strips to solder up and each strip contains 10 LED modules, the last time I tried to solder these, I had more fail than ended up on the board so I was determined to find a better way
So what I have is this
TEFAL Convection toaster oven I picked up new but on a big time sale at the local hardware store
Tubes of Solder paste
bunch of WS2812 LEDs to solder that are a PITB to solder by hand
NO Stencil for for the soldering 
bunch of boards waiting for the LEDS
So I have been meaning to give the Oven a try after I had converted the controller to something designed for re-flow, alas time was against me so I decided to see how easy it is without all the fancy controls
Well as it turned out and as you will see in the video, it was actually quite easy (Well the re-flow part anyway), the application of the solder paste was a pain without a solder mask and my first attempts with a small flat screwdriver ended up with loads of bridges I had to clean up with solder wick
Second attempy was using an old needle from an INK refill system I had long abandoned but happened to fit nicely onto the end of the syringe containing the solder, it took some strength to squeeze it out of he tube with it did allow much finer control of the application, more practice is needed though to get proficient at it.
At the end of the day, the effort was worth it and I now have six boards competed with seven more to do and only had a few bridges on the second attempt which was 5 strips at once
I have one faulty LED where the red led is not working, once im done with the remaining board, if i have spare LEDs i will replace it, till then it will have to stay
this is the heat profile I used, simply the timer on my camera and an Agilent DMM with a thermocouple, very easy and simple to repeat
here is the video
and thats all there is too it, now to get the next party goer kitted out for the pending bash
