Introduction:

Near the beginning of November, the NBitWonder staff was contacted by the community outreach team at Farnell. From their email:

Great site. Loved some of the builds you have put together and
wondered whether you’d be interested in the following to provide
parts for any up and coming builds?

As a key pillar of the electronics blogging community we have
indentified your blog to road test some of our new products we
currently have on sale. If you are interested in this scheme then we
will happily send you products which will be yours to keep, free of
charge in exchange for a review of the item.
As a high service distributor across the world, Farnell strive to
gauge feedback from those within the industry with an online presence
in order to make the necessary improvements to our products to delight
our customer base.

A “key pillar of the electronics blogging community”? Thanks Farnell, we’re flattered by the offer!

Field Testing:

So what to field test? We were given free reign to pick anything from Newark that we wanted (within reasonable cost limits, of course). We didn’t like the idea of getting some arbitrary item from them for the purposes of reviewing it, so we decided to look for tools we had legitimate uses for. At the time of this writing, NBitWonder’s projects use almost exclusively SMD components, and assembling prototypes can sometimes be a challenge, especially with small pin pitches. For this reason, we went ahead and ordered a number of flux pens from Newark, specifically this model.

About the Flux Pen:

Flux is used to help solder flow in electrical circuits, and is especially useful in SMD circuit manufacturing. A flux pen, as it sounds, is a pen-like device which contains flux. As you work your way down in package size and pin pitch, a flux pen becomes more and more useful. By the time you reach some of the high pin count QFP and QFN packages, we would daresay a flux pen becomes a necessary tool for the electronics hobbyist.

We chose the Kester 83 primarily because it’s no-clean flux and ROHS compliant, but especially because, of all the flux pens, it was the cheapest (who doesn’t like cheap, right?)

Using the flux pen:

Using a flux pen is much like using a screwdriver, you just push it to the board and do it. For those who need more formal instruction, you depress the pen tip and wipe it across the surface you wish to apply flux to.

The flux pens worked quite well, and a picture of a soldered QFP64 IC from VoIP32v3.0 is shown below. Notice the residue that can be seen around the chip where flux has dried.

Conclusion:

The flux pens worked very well, easing the task of soldering fine pitch ICs. I recommend them to the advanced electronics hobbyists, as they make those small, frustrating parts much easier to solder. So go grab your own, and write about your experiences below!