Deadly insane design (CIF FT 02 reflow oven) Teardown - rant - safety fix

[wraper]

Yesterday I received CIF FT 02 reflow oven, made in France.
As Dave says, I took it apart even before switching on  Seems that controller was designed by team of trained monkeys (or maybe just monkeys  ). Using quality parts, they built utterly dangerous device. Not like Chinese who do it to make chap crap but just because of insane stupidity. Frankly saying it is a first time I see something like that. I say right away that DANGEROUS design flaws start from the middle of the post, first half is just teardown photos with small description. There are links to the high res version below each image so you can see in detail what's going on.

Oven with top cover opened.

Top cover with quartz heat lamps.

Control block.

PSU made by Artesyn, model NAL40-7612

Controller PCB.
Microcontroller: MC68HC908GP32CP
EEPROM 24C08
DS1307 RTC
DG409 analog multiplexer
AD595-AQ thermocouple amplifier in ceramic package
TLC1549 10 bit ADC
ULN2003A
SSR: Crydom PF240D25 - drives 2 kW of load.
JQ1a-12V-F Panasonic relay
Two MAX232 and DB9 connectors  are not mounted, should be used in bigger model which has com port.
LCD is 16x2 but very big.

Controller, bottom side.

They screwed with crimp connectors, changed all of them. They are Molex BTW. They used those meant for thinner wire.


Have not right connector? Let's cut what we have 

Here is starting the most interesting

See bright squares around the pads, that is creepage distance between mains and GND.

Creepage might be ok on bottom side if there wasn't that circle. Why it is there? My guess as yours. To fix this madness and better show whats going on, I removed SSR, relay and connector.

But this is just insane. Who in sound mind would fill ground around pads directly connected to the mains. Creepage is only about 0.3 mm

As ground is filled all across the high voltage traces I decided to just move all mains connected parts out of the board.

Safety fix almost completed, need to tie the wires. Drilled 3 holes, mounted solid state relay and terminal block. Then rewired whole thing.

[mcinque]

0.3 between live and gnd 

[mikeselectricstuff]

I suspect that WTF thin track is because they didn't know how to tell their PCB software to increase backoff on the copper pour.
 

[tom66]

I doubt this "CIF" is made in France.

I saw a CIF at my work place opened up and it was basically an Aoyue. Similar parts to my Aoyue 968 (pump, PCB, etc.), but the RRP was over four times as much at around £650.00.

I think all they do is buy products from China, make some minor change so they can stick "made in France" on it (probably adding an instruction manual or undoing a screw) and then sell them for exorbitant prices.

This might not be true for all CIF gear, but it was true for the 968 rebadge I saw.

[c4757p]

0.3mm creepage makes baby Jesus cry.

I suspect that WTF thin track is because they didn't know how to tell their PCB software to increase backoff on the copper pour.

And France, I take it, does not have Google.

I doubt this "CIF" is made in France.

I saw a CIF at my work place opened up and it was basically an Aoyue.

There is French on the PCB.

[wraper]

I doubt this "CIF" is made in France.

I think it is French written on the controller pcb. This is for sure not cheap chinese. All Japanese capacitors, Crydom SSR. They just made insane electronics from the very good parts.

[c4757p]

They just made insane electronics from the very good parts.

Stupidly good parts, I'd suggest. Is it just the photo, or do I see a ceramic DIP from Analog Devices? (Edit: yep, you already listed it, AD595.) Damn, that must have cost as much as everything else on that board together! And why on earth is everything in a socket, are you supposed to program the ULN2003A? Or is that how they say "these came from a Chinese dumpster, you'll probably have to replace them so we made it easy!"

[wraper]

And why on earth is everything in a socket

And not just cheap sockets but machined sockets.

[TopLoser]

I doubt this "CIF" is made in France.

I saw a CIF at my work place opened up and it was basically an Aoyue. Similar parts to my Aoyue 968 (pump, PCB, etc.), but the RRP was over four times as much at around £650.00.

I think all they do is buy products from China, make some minor change so they can stick "made in France" on it (probably adding an instruction manual or undoing a screw) and then sell them for exorbitant prices.

This might not be true for all CIF gear, but it was true for the 968 rebadge I saw.

Yes this particular item is 'designed' and made in France. CIF do a range of products and most are rebadged - the 852 hot air rework stations for example. But this one is very much French through and through.

I look forwards to comments about the UI of this oven next... gulp...

[IanB]

And why on earth is everything in a socket?

There's a lower parts cost by eliminating sockets I suppose--but mounting chips in sockets is good for diagnostics and repair surely? And of course it reduces the risk of any heat damage to expensive parts if there is a lack of process control in the soldering. The economics of small volume, high value device manufacturing are probably different from low cost consumer boards produced by the million...

[wraper]

UI is slow and kinda stupid but WTF I'm not going to play games on it  BTW Those photos are very high res, were 24 Mpix originally. You can count dust particles on the board if zoom in.

[tom66]

The design looks like it came out of the mid 80's.  A 68K processor with an external mux for switching the ADC channels (surprised it has an internal ADC TBH), separate EEPROM and DIP-style xtal.  You could probably replace 90% of that board with a single micro these days and do it all SMD.  Very odd, must be expensive to produce but probably a case of not wanting to re-engineer something which works.

[TopLoser]

Email sent to CIF with a link to this thread...

Votre message a bien été envoyé à notre équipe.
 
Votre message: Maybe your engineers should see this?

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/reviews/deadly-insane-design-%28cif-ft-02-reflow-oven%29-teardown-rant-safety-fix/?topicseen
 
Nous vous répondrons dès que possible.

 

[Rasz]

Isnt this illegal in EU to sell?
They violate IEC 664/664A by a wide margin, is there CE (China Emulate?) on the box?

[Wann]

Email sent to CIF with a link to this thread...

Votre message a bien été envoyé à notre équipe.
 
Votre message: Maybe your engineers should see this?

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/reviews/deadly-insane-design-%28cif-ft-02-reflow-oven%29-teardown-rant-safety-fix/?topicseen
 
Nous vous répondrons dès que possible.

 

Thanks wraper for finding this stupid dangerous error.
I'm gonna tear that control board out of my unit next week

[wraper]

Isnt this illegal in EU to sell?
They violate IEC 664/664A by a wide margin, is there CE (China Emulate?) on the box?

There is CE mark on the back of the oven.

[tom66]

It could be a self certification and so never actually been through any compliance testing. I think you can do that with certain items, but I didn't think it applied to anything wall powered.

Wonder how long it has been out for sale.

[wraper]

It could be a self certification and so never actually been through any compliance testing. I think you can do that with certain items, but I didn't think it applied to anything wall powered.

Wonder how long it has been out for sale.

Schematic (block) in the manual is dated 2005. The most recent date on the parts in my unit 12 44. So it might be selling 7-8 years.

[chickenHeadKnob]

The design looks like it came out of the mid 80's.  A 68K processor with an external mux for switching the ADC channels (surprised it has an internal ADC TBH), separate EEPROM and DIP-style xtal.  You could probably replace 90% of that board with a single micro these days and do it all SMD.  Very odd, must be expensive to produce but probably a case of not wanting to re-engineer something which works.

An MC68hc908 is an 8/16 bit 6809 family not 68K so even earlier than mid 80's. Late 70's early 80's was about when 6809 design-ins were the most popular. Although this particular processor may have come later. It does have have that look and feel I must admit. The last time I saw a board layout screw-up like this was when an overtaxed and out of his depth engineer from another local company farmed out the board layout to a clueless technician working at my company who happened to be moonlighting to make a little extra cash. One morning the technician shows up in the lunchroom all beaming and proud with a large mixed signal DSP audio processing board and hands it to me. I take one look at it and follow the inputs all the way to the ADC which was on the far side, so the audio signal was being routed through about 300mm high clocked DSP digital goodness. I said this is a noise disaster! He snatched the board from me and walked out in a huff, and he never asked me for my opinion ever again. I learned through the grapevine that board had about 6 bits of usable signal above the noise floor and they scrapped it.

I suspect some thing similar happened here. They fobbed off the layout to some non-engineer flunky and since it worked they figured it was OK.

[fluxcapacitor]

This is from page 2 of the manual ,it lists the various eec standards .

[IanB]

Of course with poor mains isolation from ground a fault is mainly likely to cause a blown fuse or tripped breaker and possibly damage the equipment. The risk to human operators is maybe not so great?

[wraper]

This is from page 2 of the manual ,it lists the various eec standards .

Newer version in my manual.

[SeanB]

Phillipe will be doing some brick extrusion Monday for sure. Self certified to comply with the standards and then have all the minor flaws about creepage pointed out.

As a plus with all IC's being socketed a replacement board with proper clearance will be easy to do, just change the chips over, unsolder the SSR ( likely even more expensive than the rest of the board devices) and solder in the new larger clearance position on the board.

[free_electron]

ah. judging by the font used on the pcb and the shapes of things : they are using altium.... but using it wrong

that trace around the HV block : they have drawn a trace not connected to any net to block the GND plane to pull back. if you tick on 'remove isolated copper' it will make a nice clearing.
They should have set those traces to 'keepout' instead.

And then the dolt that made that nice contour only did ti on the bottom layer. it should have been drawn as a multilayer track.

 

sacre bleu !

[Bored@Work]

Phillipe will be doing some brick extrusion Monday for sure. Self certified to comply with the standards and then have all the minor flaws about creepage pointed out.

Phillipe will do nothing on Monday if he knows the business. Because one of the issues with the dreaded CE mark and compliance statement is that false statements hardly have any serious consequences, especially no personal consequences for those signing compliance statements. CE violations are in practice not properly prosecuted. If things start to get a bit tough Phillipe will issue a voluntary withdrawal from the market and the authorities will pat him on the back for being such a good boy.