Oddball Hotplate

I made a special hotplate for soldering all the circuit boards for the Blueman project. It’s 22″ long and 1″ wide. I made it out of a single block of aluminum that I CNC milled to fit two 750 watt heaters and a thermocouple. There’s also a PIC that monitors the thermocouple and has a relay to turn the heaters on and off. The display shows target and current temperatures to within 1/4 degree Celcius. Having this to do my soldering kept me from losing my sanity. There’s 0ver 1000 solder joints on each wand!