Development of Low-Cost Reflow Oven for SMT Assembly

Reflow Oven is one of the equipment in an SMT line that performs the soldering phases of the SMD components. These components were previously placed on the PCB that has been coated with solder paste at the corresponding copper pads. The Reflow Oven developed here has heating elements to produce time-varying temperature, with a profile according to the desired specification at each solder-reflow phase. This paper describes the design, implementation, and testing of the hardware, software, and and their integration in the reflow oven machine. The temperature control system uses a PID control algorithm. The values of the PID parameters are determined using Ziegler-Nichols method. Through the GUI, the user can program the temperature profile and will be able to monitor and record the temperature change in the oven in real-time. The reflow oven prototype developed in this work has been tested and is able to be used to assemble a number of functioning SMT boards each of which contains an 8 pin SOIC 555 Time IC.