sometimes people focus too much on the temp of their iron instead of the temp of the joint the solder melts at a known point, and well before any risk of damage to most components where components are extraordinarily sensitive to temps the datasheet will include a reflow curve for guidance i run the iron anywhere from 280C to 450C depending on what i'm working on whatever it takes to get the joint to flow without me stressing the pcb going over and over it

btw, I use the similar technique for cutting but finishing it with sand paper ;) works every time

320deg c is the go to temp then my iron has a boost button I can use for some of the harder to do ground pins.

My Tenma solder station had a 350C setting that was fine when it was new. Pretty soon I had to crank it up to 400 just to melt solder. Recently I had to go hotter than that until I replaced the tip, and now 350 is plenty. But the manual says readings are only accurate if the iron has been calibrated to the specific tip. So your approach seems pretty good - use the minimum that works. And if it stops working, figure out why.

Cool project! I'm not familiar with the Z8S180, but did use Hitachi's 64180 SoC with the Integrated Z80. But at that time, I was mostly working on a custom computer with NEC's V20 (because Intel didn't make a CMOS 8088 yet, and our computers had to run from batteries) running Kadak's AMX RTOS, and I was also designing peripheral devices and tiny computer projects using NEC's uPD-78C10, which was also a hybrid between and 8085 and a Z80, or something like that. And I dabbles with the Z8 a bit, which looked very interesting. Unfortunately, I never designed any products with it. I've still got some Zilog dev.kits, hard-copy manuals, abd (the best part) a couple of Zilog T-Shirts! Are those chips over $10- ??!!! I'm guessing that you have lots of Z80 code kicking around from prior projects. I'd forgotten that 40+ years ago, I was programming video terminals for industrial HMI on Ferguson "Big Boards", running CPM on 4 x 8" Floppy drives. The setup for the 4 drives was that they contained: 1. Boot floppy with CPM OS on it. 2. Editor program floppy 3. Source-code files, and destination for executables 4. The assembler and linker. It was cool tech. The company, Dynapro, eventually was acquired by Allen Bradley.

There's no way I'd do this without the hotplate method, I'm never touching a soldering iron on SMD parts ever again.

Hi John, I know this is completely unrelated to the video, do you think it would be feasible to use entirely postscript for writing basic documents, like someone would use groff or latex?

Quick question John ... I was having trouble finding the IS61WV10248EDBLL and in any case they seem really pricey, so I pre-emptively ordered a IS61WV20488BLL-10TLI instead (which was cheaper anyway.) (Of course it's coming from AliExpres, so there's always an outside chance it's actually a rebranded IS61WV10248 in wolf's clothing, in which case ... problem solved.) Assuming it's authentic, as far as I can tell, the two are pretty similar, except for A20 being broken out 'and' the 1M chip having built in error correction. I looked but I couldn't find any mention of ECC for the 2M version. Thoughts? Should it work? If you're okay with it, would it make sense for me to modify your board to add the extra trace? Ooww ... I just finished watching the video and see you haven't even attached the SRAM. So, what gives? Are you having issues getting these chips too?

You could have made life a lot easier by using a PLCC version and a through hole socket. It's not as if you don't have enough space.