Is anyone having difficulty with soldering to ground on the Betaflight FC?  It feels like I am putting so much heat to it.  I have a pretty high end soldering iron.  I find myself having to turn the temp up to 400C to get solder to stick to grounds.  I was able to solder everything and got the board to work. But when I tried to desolder one of the ground wire because I needed to remove an ESC, I fried the FC because I put too much heat.

Do you use any kind of flux?

Use leaded solder with rosin core, if that is not enough, get some flux and ise it on the pads before soldering.

Also check your irons tip. Maybe it is time to get a new tip?

I used rosin core lead solder and even extra rosin. There is something about the design of this board that takes a lot of heat. Soldering tip is brand new.

No trouble with anything other board except this one. On the rcgroup forum, others are having similar issues.

How many Watts power does your iron have?

As the BFFC is also a PDB, the power pads are going to be connected to a very thick layer of copper in the circuit board. If your iron doesn't have enough power to heat the pad up faster than the layer can wick the heat away, then this is what happens.

My normal iron only has 48W and that isn't enough for some PDBs, so I use another iron with 60W and a chisel tip for soldering PDBs and similar.

One of the best investment I have done is the ts-100 soldering iron from banggood. It solders those big power cables and pads like a champ. I recommended it to a friend, and he got it and he thinks it works better than his weller soldering station

(20-Mar-2017, 09:44 AM)unseen Wrote: How many Watts power does your iron have?

As the BFFC is also a PDB, the power pads are going to be connected to a very thick layer of copper in the circuit board. If your iron doesn't have enough power to heat the pad up faster than the layer can wick the heat away, then this is what happens.

My normal iron only has 48W and that isn't enough for some PDBs, so I use another iron with 60W and a chisel tip for soldering PDBs and similar.

I have a rework station with a 70w iron. Soldering onto the big pads with my large flat bevel tips was not the problem. It was the small through holes ground where I have to use a smaller tip.

Just a personal experience, I find flight controllers from FPVModel tend to be a little greasy and I also found it harder to solder. One thing you can try to do is wipe the solder pads with alcohol before soldering... and yes use solder paste helps a great deal too.

(20-Mar-2017, 05:26 PM)Oscar Wrote: Just a personal experience, I find boards from FPVModel tend to be a little greasy and I also found it harder to solder. One thing you can try to do is wipe the solder pads with alcohol before soldering... and yes use solder paste helps a great deal too.

That is a good tip. I will try it next time.

(20-Mar-2017, 02:07 PM)oyvinla Wrote: One of the best investment I have done is the ts-100 soldering iron from banggood. It solders those big power cables and pads like a champ. I recommended it to a friend, and he got it and he thinks it works better than his weller soldering station

I've been keeping an eye on that iron for a while so I'm happy to read some positive feedback about it. 
On the other hand now it will be even harder to ignore it every time I open BG and it's featured in the first page just to tempt me

I've also noticed that some PDBs can be a pita to solder due to quick heat dissipation but I consider it to be generally a good thing as it means that they didn't save on the copper.

(20-Mar-2017, 02:07 PM)oyvinla Wrote: One of the best investment I have done is the ts-100 soldering iron from banggood. It solders those big power cables and pads like a champ. I recommended it to a friend, and he got it and he thinks it works better than his weller soldering station

are you referring to this one?
http://www.banggood.com/MINI-TS100-Digit...mds=search

(23-Mar-2017, 12:43 AM)Oscar Wrote: are you referring to this one?
http://www.banggood.com/MINI-TS100-Digit...mds=search

Yeah, that's the one. You'll need a separate power supply to make it work but a laptop supply with a 5.5x2.5 barrel connector will work. I recently made a xt60 to barre connector cable for the ability to run it from lipos

I just completed a Chameleon build using this FC and I can confirm that the ground pads are a little trickier than the others.  I didn't find it an issue on the PDB side (battery and ESC power) and I used a bit of flux as well as the iron up high.

It became more of an issue for the ESC signal and video grounds.  I wanted to use the wires straight from the components which was very light stuff.  Getting these on was tough!!  Again a slightly hotter iron and being fairly swift sorted it out so the insulation didn't melt.

I still think it's a great FC, but not ideal for a Chameleon because of the battery lead out the back.  If they could do a version with the XT60 on the side like a Matek PDB that would be awesome .  I really hope the guys who developed this board keep up the development and come up with some variants and improvements based on real use.  Things like the SD slot and the battery connections.

(09-May-2017, 04:57 PM)hendrixhughes Wrote: I just completed a Chameleon build using this FC and I can confirm that the ground pads are a little trickier than the others.  I didn't find it an issue on the PDB side (battery and ESC power) and I used a bit of flux as well as the iron up high.

It became more of an issue for the ESC signal and video grounds.  I wanted to use the wires straight from the components which was very light stuff.  Getting these on was tough!!  Again a slightly hotter iron and being fairly swift sorted it out so the insulation didn't melt.

I still think it's a great FC, but not ideal for a Chameleon because of the battery lead out the back.  If they could do a version with the XT60 on the side like a Matek PDB that would be awesome .  I really hope the guys who developed this board keep up the development and come up with some variants and improvements based on real use.  Things like the SD slot and the battery connections.

I have since built three quads with this FC. The best way I found was to use a bigger tip. I like the chisel tip. Place the tip to the pad for a few seconds before introducing the solder.

I am so disappointed with this FC. It is the purest nightmare to solder and something dodgy is going on with the pdb integration, too.
Whenever I arm the FrSky XSR I get big fat horizontal bars in my vtx. When I take the 5v from external source, no problem. But all 5V outputs on this board cause these bars.
But yeah, different topic. Still trying to solder the receiver in a fashion that does not always come off mid flight! Hate this board. .. other than that .. best board ever

(24-Jun-2017, 06:44 AM)EricPilot87 Wrote: I am so disappointed with this FC. It is the purest nightmare to solder and something dodgy is going on with the pdb integration, too.
Whenever I arm the FrSky XSR I get big fat horizontal bars in my vtx. When I take the 5v from external source, no problem. But all 5V outputs on this board cause these bars.
But yeah, different topic. Still trying to solder the receiver in a fashion that does not always come off mid flight! Hate this board. .. other than that .. best board ever

I have built three quads using this board since I made the original post. I have gotten quite good with soldering to this board. First off, a good soldering iron helped. I thought my rework station was pretty good, but ended up returning it for other reason. I currently have a Weller and a Hakko, both worked well. This board draws a lot of heat away. If you soldering iron can't keep up, you will not get solder to stick. For the larger pads, use a wide chisel tip. If your chisel tip is beveled and you can also use the corner to solder to the smaller hole pins. Iron temp 700-750F. Add flux, wet tip with solder, and heat the pad 2-3 seconds before adding solder.