Electronics > Repair

Weller WD1 Discussion and Repair

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quanttrom:
I'll just leave this right here in case it's ever useful to anyone..

I got my hands on a broken Weller WD1. This is the rather basic variant with single output and no USB connectivity but it is still a rather nice soldering iron IMHO.

I managed to get the schematics of it and I will try to explain the working of it to the best of my understanding. Corrections and discussions are welcome.

The soldering iron has a transformer with 2 output voltages on it. One is 12V the other is 24V. There are 2 separate boards. First PCB includes all the 24V electronics while the second board is the control and user interface.
First board:
The 12V AC output is rectified with a single diode and then fed straight into the control PCB.
The 24V AC is used to power the heating element. A TLP160J  optocoupler (http://www.toshiba.com/taec/components2/Datasheet_Sync/210/4350.pdf) is used for isolating the control circuitry from the heating circuitry.  A BTA12 triac is used to turn the heating element on and off.
The zero-crossing detection of the 24V AC is done using a 100k/100k voltage divider with clamping diodes, etc. The output of this is fed into the control board into the /INT1 (pin 9) input of the micro.
Control Board:
The 12V DC from the first board is reduced to 5V through a linear regulator. Run of the mill 7805 (78M05) .
The whole design is based around a PIC18F4620. The buttons on the faceplate are directly connected to the micro. The LCD display is driven by a PCF8576 driver (http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/PCF8576.pdf) . The PIC and the LCD driver communicate through an I2C bus.

There is some analog circuitry on the temperature probe output that comes in from the soldering iron pencil. It is based around MCP601 op-amp. The positive input is connected through a 1k5 resistor to microcontroller pin 5 -  RD7 (I assume they use it as PWM output from the micro) and fed in the opamp
The opamp is used to prove a (what seems to be rather large ~31) gain to the signal from the temperature probe.  The output of this circuit is fed into pin 20 (AN1) where they use the build in 10-bit AD converter.

There are some other feedback signals used but I am not sure what their purpose is. One is fed into AN4 (pin 24) and another one into RD2(pin 40) .

Header X3 is used for programming.  TE Connectivity 8-215464-0.

And that's all she wrote !

The PIC was damaged...somehow..on the unit that I got. I was able to make a programming header and use it to read the firmware from another good unit and program it into this one. A PICkit2 programmer was used. Overall a rather painless process once I acquired a new micro and the proper connection header. The second unit wasn't mine so I wouldn't be allowed to solder wires and butcher the whole station.

10 bucks and a couple of hours of fidgeting around trying to get all the info proved very useful :)

Blog post + pics : http://www.quanttrom.com/2013/12/hardware/weller-wd1/weller-wd1-repair/

M. András:
it would be good to be able to speed up that display it slow as hell and most of the times i dont know what temp is it displaying but not the actual, while the wd1m i have outputs the actual temp trought usb to the weller software intrestingly

kripton2035:
it is quite extraordinary that you were able to read a PIC' firmware out of a commercial product...

M. András:
haha i doubt they did even brother to prevent reading it out, wd1m has the option to upgrade the firmware trough usb but there is no firmware anywhere on their sites and doesnt even reply for for it

quanttrom:
The USB is actually done using a serial to USB converter board. There isn't anything magical about it. I believe a different firmware load is also required.

I've hooked up an oscilloscope to the TX/RX pins that typically go to the USB board and I don't see any kind of signals on them. There is a possibility the software needs to send some magical init sequence before they start outputting info.

Actually I am kind of curious. M. Andras would you be interested in reading out the firmware from your WD1M ?

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