Using a pizza oven for reflow soldering has already been done a million times by hackers\/makers all over the world. You can even buy a ready made reflow controllers for such setups. Still, I will present my approach here since it is a little bit different from others I have seen so far.<\/p>\n
Most setups use a relay to switch the heating element on\/off. Some designs use a SSR and even have elaborate features like zero-crossing-detect. However, I didnt want to mess around with mains voltage. Thats why I decided to use a DMX512-Dimmer do control the heating element. When you think about it, its just another kind of lamp. So why not use a device made to control lamps?<\/p>\n
The actual control is done with a Raspberry-Pi. I used a “max6667” Thermocouple amplifier from ebay which is interfaced via SPI. Fortunately there was enought sample code available on the net, I only had to do a litte copy&paste to get it running. I did modify the code to use the py-spidev<\/a> library. My sourcecode is attached to this post. I also used python to run the PID-Temperature-Loop. Since that code is really ugly I wont publish it now\u00c2\u00a0 \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n Here is a picture of the complete Setup:<\/p>\n\n\t\t