exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Hi All,

Along with recommendations on where to buy the genuine STM32's. Does anybody have a good link or can point me in the direction of where to buy decent leaded solder paste.

Primarily for soldering these chips to the dodgy STM boards but also for other SMT work.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

Brett

BrettRogersUK wrote: 23 Aug 2023 20:25 Hi All,

Along with recommendations on where to buy the genuine STM32's. Does anybody have a good link or can point me in the direction of where to buy decent leaded solder paste.

Primarily for soldering these chips to the dodgy STM boards but also for other SMT work.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

Brett

Might be worth asking @PhilC and see what he used, but personally I find that solder paste can be a bit awkward to work with, so you might find it a little easier to drag solder it after aligning and tacking down the 4 corners.

It's a personal preference as I seem to struggle with paste behaving. In fact I rarely use paste at all these days, and I get good results drag soldering:


Of course it does help to have a microscope :)

Could just be my paste I suppose, but I find that without stencils it can be a bit hit and miss, especially if the solder mask is a bit iffy.

BTW I took a punt and ordered the HiLetgo boards from Amazon to see if it resolves my BlueSCSI issues. Fingers crossed.

Got my fingers crossed for you @rubber_jonnie hope they sort you out.

I've not really had that much luck with paste either but I got a small tub of it from ebay (Chinese). When using it and applying heat to it it just balled up and didn't adhere to the pin pads on the board.

So I had to resort to drag soldering of the chips on the board and then I ended up using solder wick to soak up the solder bridges that appeared afterwards.

BrettRogersUK wrote: 24 Aug 2023 12:03 Got my fingers crossed for you @rubber_jonnie hope they sort you out.

I've not really had that much luck with paste either but I got a small tub of it from ebay (Chinese). When using it and applying heat to it it just balled up and didn't adhere to the pin pads on the board.

So I had to resort to drag soldering of the chips on the board and then I ended up using solder wick to soak up the solder bridges that appeared afterwards.

Thanks.

I have a couple of tubes of Mechanic brand from eBay, but rarely use them at all of late. Aside from drag soldering, I do also prep the pads with flux and leaded solder and then use hot air to melt them before dropping on components.

Drag and wick works very well.

I think that's what I'm gonna do from now on.

I've just done my other genuine chip and soldered it onto one of the boards that didn't work and its now working as it should so again, must have been a suspect chip. Still doesn't detect it though when plugging usb in as a virtual serial port (linux) so couldn't test the diagnostics again but it works with this ACSI2STM firmware so I'm now happy.

I've got three working blue pill boards. Happy Days!!!

Cheers

Edit: MISCOUNTED, It's actually FOUR working boards now.

BrettRogersUK wrote: 24 Aug 2023 14:03 I think that's what I'm gonna do from now on.

I've just done my other genuine chip and soldered it onto one of the boards that didn't work and its now working as it should so again, must have been a suspect chip. Still doesn't detect it though when plugging usb in as a virtual serial port (linux) so couldn't test the diagnostics again but it works with this ACSI2STM firmware so I'm now happy.

I've got three working blue pill boards. Happy Days!!!

Cheers

And there we go, a plague of dodgy BluePills is amongst us, but there are solutions.

Sorry, only just seen the mention. I use solder paste but then use a soldering iron to heat it up instead of hot air quite often but then need a microscope to check out for pin bridges and also spray the chips with IPA after and give them a good going over with a tooth brush.

Ok, so the BluePills I ordered from the same source as Brett (Hiletgo Bluepill BluePill) arrived whilst I was at black belt camp over the weekend, but as I'm on holiday I decided to test them as soon as I could, which was this morning.

Both arrived with blinky installed and running, and the diags worked flawlessly - both seem to be good :)

So the two I have are quite fake and show themselves up as so by the fact that whilst you can program the diags, there is no way to connect over USB serial and actually run them.

These two fakes passed the visual inspection and program with any software fine, and pass the blinky test, but the flash is the wrong size and the USB serial doesn't work at all.

mine cam from a seller called 'devboardsltd' on eBay, so I'd probably say to avoid buying BluePills there, though they seem to be a genuine seller, which adds to the confusion.

Quick update, but with tested/passed BluePills, the BlueSCSIs are working fine with my Mac Classic.

rubber_jonnie wrote: 04 Sep 2023 12:48 Quick update, but with tested/passed BluePills, the BlueSCSIs are working fine with my Mac Classic.

:dualthumbup: