858D Hot Air

[hpmaxim]

Feel free to shoot me for starting a new thread or not reading the one post in another.  After reading through the threads it seems that the internal guts of the 858D seem to vary significantly from one unit to another, including different MCUs and different board designs.

I'm thinking of buying one.  I'd like to buy one that meets the following criteria:

1) US plug/120V
2) Constructed properly (fuse on 'hot' line, and proper ground), and good construction practices -- I can probably fix any thing, and I know enough to double check all the grounds and the fuse -- but I'd prefer to not have it die because of a wire broke and then it over heated and caught on fire because a wire was badly run and mechanically stressed.
3) AVR MCU -- It'd be nice to be able to hack it, since it appears there are significant improvements available, but it appears there are options even for the non-AVR ones.  Also, does any one know if different MCUs have different performance since presumably their firmwares aren't identical.

I was under the impression the YouTue 858D+ is the best bet, until early in 2016, but a year later not so much.  The Yihua units seem to have collected a bad rap.  There are a host of these units on eBay for around $30 (shipped, oddly, from the US), including a couple unbranded one, Ansai, Gaoyue (its yellow!), Yihau, Youyue,  Uyue, WEP.

 

[WaveyDipole]

I recently purchased what I thought was an unbranded 'generic' 858D from Amazon but there is a small HK logo on it with the name HiYLKKO. My understanding was that these all come from the same outlet in Shenzen or wherever, so its interesting to note that there are subtle differences. Perhaps there are a number of far east outfits making them to the same spec/design more or less. This unit did have a number of the issues that had been previously noted:

1. 13A fuse in plug
2. Case was not earthed
3. Fuse was on the neutral rather than live side

There seemed to be no issues with short or stressed wires, although about 6in of mains flex was still in the case and the cable didn't reach the floor from my desk! I was able to extract a further 4-5in of cable which allowed the flex to reach the 4-way. After that, having corrected all of the above I tried it out using the medium size nose. I had an old SMD board to practice on and found much easier to remove components cleanly with this than messing around and really struggling with a soldering iron. I can't comment on the 120v aspect as I'm in the UK where we have 230/240v mains, but am pleased with the purchase. Only time will tell how long it lasts.