I was feeling the same :D.

Boy, because of 500c you made me do all that? I was feeling like the Crimson Fleet treated me nicer here.

Not sure if that helps your research. We have an (very expensive “upper 4 digit region” they didn’t tell me exactly) DJI drone (an Matrice 30T if I remember correctly) at work that has the option of operating autonomously with a base-station where it also automatically lands and recharges. The catch is it’s like impossible to operate autonomous UAVs here because of airspace restrictions (that’s why we only have the “manual” version without that base-station thingy). I’m not directly involved in the department that operates the drone so I don’t have more in depth insights but maybe that already helps a little.

Fun fact, our military had to cancel a large and very expensive drone program because the drone (a little larger one tho) couldn’t get certified in European airspace (“Eurohawk” if you want to google that). So I’m not sure how easy it will be to hack something together depending where you are in the world and what restrictions say there.

I’m sure https://lemmy.world/c/pcmasterrace can help :)

Mine is the smallest one of a series of these, it has two heating elements inside.

I don’t have it for that long but I didn’t have problems so far, I’m usually only making rather small PCBs tho. I did make some recommended modifications like replacing the paper insulation tape with a kapton tape, proper grounding and flashed another firmware.

I did only use a small hotplate and/or a hotair station, so it seems to be definitely a stepup here 😌.

Yeah I have such a small, cheap Chinese one (T962) that I modified and flashed a nicer firmware on.

I basically populated the bottom side (with more components) first after applying solder past with a stencil, then reflowed the board. After cooling down I applied the solder paste to the upper side (with the LED) by using a small needle on a syringe (because using a stencil was too weird since the board wasn’t laying flat) but since the pads are relatively large and not that many that worked fine. Then I placed the components on that side and simply run the reflow cycle again.

I started with the bottom side because there are no heavy components. I expected heavy parts to just fall off on the second reflow cycle so I tried to avoid that.

At the end I manually assembled the USB connector using a regular soldering iron and tons of flux gel.