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  • Author Author: shabaz
  • Date Created: 21 Sep 2022 4:17 PM Date Created
  • Views 16484 views
  • Likes 15 likes
  • Comments 14 comments
  • battery contacts
  • resistance welder
  • spot welder
  • dx10
  • Welder
  • battery tabs
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DX10 Battery Contact Spot Welder Teardown

shabaz
shabaz
21 Sep 2022

Introduction

The DX10 is a low-cost battery-powered spot-welder. It comes with a couple of electrodes, a length of metal strip (for use as battery tabs), a small piece of abrasive paper (for reshaping the electrodes as they wear out, or for removing oxide), a USB C cable, and a nice cloth case that feels water-resistant (it might not be!).

image


In use, you place the metal strip onto the desired surface, and then apply the electrodes at two points on the strip. Once the DX10 detects the resistance has dropped to a level, then current is applied and heat is generated due to metal resistance, and welds are formed.

This blog post just contains some teardown photos of the DX10, because I wanted to see the internals, and I didn’t find the information on the Internet. The unit is available on AliExpress or Amazon (costs more there!). The particular seller I used was called 'Learning education store' on AliExpress.

Note: There is a risk of a battery short when removing the internals from the enclosure. It’s not recommended to disassemble this unit unless you're an engineer and are aware of the risk. It will also probably invalidate any warranty, since a couple of the screws are not removable.

image Screenshot: AliExpress

How does it work?

The way it works, is that the items (say two flat strips of metal) to be welded are placed together, and then two electrodes are placed one on each side, or on one side. Current is passed through the electrodes and the items being welded, and the resistance of the items, results in heat being generated. In theory you can control the heat by adjusting the current, the amount of time of the current pulse (or pulses), and the actual resistance of the items being welded (the pressure of the electrodes will also make a difference to that; a good contact is required so that the items are heated and not the copper electrodes).

In practice the DX10 technically doesn’t have directly adjustable current; other parameters are adjusted. It may be as simplistic as a configurable burst of current, or there may be pulses, to pre-heat the weld location. I don’t know what algorithm the DX10 implements; I have not used it yet!

image


Internals

It’s actually not easy to unscrew the DX10, because a couple of the screws are deliberately mashed by the manufacturer! I had to take a dremel to them and cut a notch in the head of the screws. A possible Dremel-less approach would be to unscrew the rear of the unit (which has unmashed screws) and pull out the unit from that end; there are a couple of side metal rods that would need to be removed, and the battery has a foam pad stuck to one side which makes it harder to pull from that end, but it could be feasible.

The unit is quite well built. There are a couple of slabs of LiPo cells, in parallel, attached to a circuit board that fits into guides inside the enclosure. The unit is rated to be 10.6AH, which I have no reason to disbelieve yet (the battery size is substantial).

image


There is a nice, very readable two-color OLED screen. The unit makes beeps during some operations such as power-on/off, and it’s of good volume. The main connector looks like EC5. It’s good that it is a standard connector, so that new electrode cables can be attached if desired.

image

With the OLED display removed, it can be seen that there is a Nuvoton 8051-based microcontroller present. The MOSFETs are HYG011N04 and there are six of them (three on either side).

The two cells are directly connected to the PCB, due to the very high current requirement. There is a DW01-A battery IC on the board (on the left side in the photo below), however you can’t rely on that for complete safety; there will still be a risk with such high current through the MOSFETS. Personally I would detach the electrode cables from the unit when not in use, to prevent an accidental short in case a MOSFET has failed.
There were a couple of other things of note. Firstly, the soldered battery contacts are just millimetres away from the conductive metal enclosure (it isn’t significantly anodised). I didn’t feel comfortable with that, in case the enclosure ever gets dented. The solution was to apply an insulator (I used Kapton tape) to the exposed metal. I covered most of the exposed metal, because if you slide out the board and battery from the case, there is a risk of a short. Also, any tool like a screwdriver or tweezers or metal pen on a desk could cause a short, so the tape provides a bit of protection against such situations.

image

Another thing was that there appear to be bronze-like metal rods soldered onto the PCB. I would like to replace them (or add) copper rods for further reducing the path resistance, but it’s risky working on a board with attached battery. I might attempt it if the spot welds are not good, but personally I wouldn’t advise it without taping up all the surroundings to protect against accidental shorts; it’s very high-risk. It will also need a lot of heat, so it needs a very powerful soldering iron.

The underside of the board doesn’t contain much beyond the MOSFETs. There is an optoisolator, and a battery charging chip, and a bit of circuitry using a SOT23-6 chip labelled AL274 (I don’t know what this is). I expected to see a bit more circuitry, perhaps an op amp, to determine the contact resistance before the unit fires a current pulse. Perhaps it is mainly done in the microcontroller chip.

image

Summary

Personally, I thought the unit was well built, although it does benefit from a bit of tape to provide a bit more protection from dents etc. The unit should be stored such that dents do not occur, and such that the front panel buttons cannot accidentally be held down to power on the unit. I might also add some heatshrink sleeving on the sides of the electrode ends, in case there are any accidental slip-ups; the electrodes should not be directly shorted when operating.

Thanks for reading!

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  • shabaz
    shabaz over 2 years ago in reply to DAB

    Hi DAB,

    I will try more batteries at some point, so that will be an opportunity to see if gets through that : ) 

    I've not done much experimentation but I thought I'd try some different steels:

    Here is spring steel on the left (the two pieces of it are 0.127 mm thick) and the right side shows the battery tab strip (i.e. nickel on steel) spot-welded to a slab of mild steel.

    The power again was at 90% for these experiments (with the DX10at approx 75% charge, I have not charged it since I bought it), and it was too high for the thin spring steel I reckon. Definitely a good idea to wear specs while doing these experiments.

    image

    Here is the result when pulling the weld apart; the spring steel came apart easily, it can be seen that the weld made a hole in both pieces, it was too much power for the thin pieces. The weld onto mild steel was great however.

    image

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  • DAB
    DAB over 2 years ago

    Very interesting.

    Are you going to give it some use to see how it holds up over time?

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  • genebren
    genebren over 2 years ago in reply to shabaz

    The fix looks pretty good, considering that you had to unfix it first.  Solder braid is another great idea! (you also might have been able to leave the existing rod in place when to added the copper rod).

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  • ralphjy
    ralphjy over 2 years ago in reply to shabaz

    This unit looks quite a bit more robust - but I guess you pay for that.

    I’m really surprised that there is no insulating material between the PCB and the case.

    Glad that you have your unit working well.

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  • shabaz
    shabaz over 2 years ago in reply to shabaz

    That did it! I didn't add another sheet, but I doubled-up the copper wires (i.e. now there are two 1.6 mm dia copper wires placed on the 0.25 mm copper sheet, to spread the load a bit better.

    Here is a photo of the attempt (same 90% setting as before), this time trying to pull off the strip caused major tearing in it. I'm very happy with this result.

    The supplied strip is 0.1mm thick, probably nickel over steel (it is magnetic). I don't currently have any other strips to test with.

    image

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