hi today we're going to be taking a look at the pine SEAL soldier 9 so this is the version 2 Soldier 9 so this is the latest revision slightly higher power but this is a portable Soldier 9 very similar to the miniware that we looked at recently the difference being that this is powered by the pine 64 risk processor so this has quite a powerful processor running at 108 megahertz they've got the details on the website here with open source firmware so you can develop your own firmware on here but it does allow you to adjust things like the PID parameters and that kind of thing for this Soldier 9 but um in terms of soldering capabilities I think this really comes down to the power delivery capability and this one is capable of delivering potentially 88 watts into the soldier 9 cartridge now I think some of that depends a little bit on the cartridges themselves we saw with the miniware even when it was running at 24 volts we weren't able to actually get that 65 watts into any of the cartridge just I've got so um it comes with one cartridge and then I ordered the high power cartridges to go with it so this should give it the best chance of delivering the most amount of power possible and we'll take a look at that shortly this is the soldier 9 up close and it's about 17 centimeters long so really quite compact again very similar to the ts-101 but the one thing to note is this is extremely lightweight it's about 20 grams on its own and just over 30 grams with one of the cartridges installed and the cartridge goes in this end here so you just slide it into the hole and just tighten up the screw very gently just to stop the cartridge from falling out just keep it retained in there on the front here we've got an OLED which is 0.69 inches in across sorry so a little bit smaller than the new ts101 I think it's the same size as the original ts100 and this one has again a two button interface to go through the menu and change some of the settings so very similar in that respect on this end we've got a USBC connector as well as a DC Barrow Jack and the Quick Charge 3 compatible USBC connector works all the way up to I think it's 20 volts but then the DC jack on this model is capable of being powered from a 12 and 24 volt power supply I think on the version one of this Soldier 9 it only accepted up to 21 volts this version 2 allows the 24 volt Supply to power it so um the other thing to mention on this one this new version has a slightly higher output power capability so 88 watts and you do need that full 24 volt Supply to be able to deliver 88 Watts basically these soldering cartridges are resistive heating elements so to be able to put more power into these you need a higher voltage of 24 volts is the highest that this one supplies so that's the unit on its own and it's got a nice little rubber grip and one thing that I noticed about the cartridge that came bundled with it which is this conical one here is at the overall length including the cartridge is quite reduced compared to the mini wear so there is a reduced distance from where you hold it to where you're soldering but it seems to be only on this one cartridge now there's two sets of cartridges that you can buy for this Soldier 9 perhaps the lower power series looks like this because I bought the the ones with the chunkier tip so that we can do some power tests with it but when you look at these they're exactly the same length as the mini wear ones so unfortunately if you want these tips with the larger geometries you're going to have to put it with that longer tip to a hand piece distance but we've got a variety of tips here this is the one that we'll use maybe we'll use this one on the 2p coin test and we'll just see how these behave when we give it a proper test so when we look at the little data sheet that comes with the soldier 9 you can see that it does have an accelerometer in the handpiece so you can use that to set it to go to sleep and to wake it back up and it automatically rotates the OLED as it did with the mini wear and then we've got a few details about it so it supports power delivery Quick Charge as well as just plain DC power modes so on the pine seal website you can actually buy the soldier 9 direct it's 25.99 but to get it in the UK you end up paying about 50 pounds then you can buy some accessories to go with it I bought the gross Soldier 9 tip set but they also do a slightly finer version and what you can see here actually is that the ones in this set here are different to the one that was bundled with the soldier line that length is quite a bit shorter than this one you might be able to see it here a little bit closer so we've got quite a short distance here where I'm using the mouse and then it's extended on these other tips so it looks like just this one that comes bundled with the soldier 9 is that shorter length which is a much better design all right so let's plug this into a quick charge 3 compatible power supply and it turns on and then we have um the menus here so we can go through and have a look at the power settings first of all so this first one is the minimum voltage so if you've connected this up to just some lithium batteries you can set the voltage at which you should shut off so it doesn't drain the batteries more than you want it to then you've got the quick charge voltage so this is the voltage that it will request from the Quick Charge compatible power supply and then we have the power delivery timeout so that's everything in the power settings then we go through to the soldering settings so we've got the Boost temperature so if you temporarily need a boost of heat something I don't necessarily disagree agree with sorry but it's a way to overcome some of the thermal limitations of one of the soldier ions it allows you to bump up the temperature temporarily and allow you to dump a lot of power into a solder joint then we've got the startup Behavior so this is whether the soldier and I should turn on the heating element the moment it's supplied with power or whether it should wait for you to actually press the plus button to start heating it up and then we've got some settings here which allows you to set the granularity of the up and down button when you're setting the temperature then we've got the sleep mode so this is the sensitivity for the motion sensor what temperature it should go to during sleep and how long it should take at least for it to get there and then after 10 minutes in this example it will shut down fully then some details about the user interface so the temperature units uh the the display orientation this is set to automatic so if we flip it around it should change by itself although maybe it needs to be out of the menu first of all uh cool down flashing so I think this basically flashes when it's cooling down at the scrolling speed so slow medium or fast for how long it takes to scroll through here which at the moment is quite slow as you can see uh and then we can swap the plus and minus buttons around if you prefer it the other way around you can speed up the animations and put the animations in Loop the display brightness for the OLED and this moves some of the numbers to the other side of the display and then how long it displays the boot logo then just finally the advanced settings so a power limit so if you have got a power supply that isn't capable of supplying 88 Watts then you can limit this in software uh that we've got the option to restore factory settings we've got temperature calibration as well as input voltage calibration Now power pulse this is if you have a battery bank that likes to see Power being drawn continuously this just gives a little blipper power at the interval um in the next screen so every four seconds here for example it will give a little blip of power and you can set the amount of power for each blip in that previous menu item how long the pulse should be and that's it right so let's try heating it up so we're getting a peak of about 40 Watts or so a little bit less on the AC Supply up the top here from my power meter and it is climbing it's a little bit slower than I would have expected um and it's moving around quite a lot but it was fairly quick to heat up and just in general in open air it looks like it's drawing about seven Watts or so so um certainly heats up fairly quick let's have a look at the calibration and just see how close it is to the number that it's displaying on the screen so we're currently set to 330 degrees C so let's try on the tip calibrator and it's probably about 14 degrees out let's increase the temperature up to 360. so again it looking like it's about 15 degrees out so let's see if we can adjust the calibration on this right so we go to advanced settings on here then we go to calibrate temperature now please ensure it's at room temperature which it is this is just um cooled down so we press the plus button and it does something here it says 833 then it says start tip temperature offset calibration so I'm assuming we press plus here and then it just goes back to start calibration I guess we press plus and it just seems to go back to this option here I've tried various different combinations of buttons try holding down Plus it just doesn't seem to do anything so I don't know if the calibration function is broken there's a bug in the firmware but I can't seem to calibrate this tip so we're just gonna have to deal with the fact that it's 15 degrees out and so to test this Soldier 9 we're going to be using a variety of pcbs that we've had manufactured at our sponsor for this video jlc PCB and as you know you can get pcbs such as this one 100 by 100 millimeters made for just two dollars plus shipping so really excellent option if you want to get some low-cost pcbs made for your prototype so don't forget to visit jlc PCB if you're thinking about getting some boards made now this board is first of all a through-hole soldering PCB so this should be very simple for this Soldier 9 but it gives a quick indication of how good it is going to be at soldering now we did see the power delivery about 50 watts and when we heated it up let's see how that translates into some actual real world soldering foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] this one's the trickier board this is a high thermal capacity board thank you foreign [Music] here appears to be the cartridge because it's not delivering power into the joint here [Music] all right foreign [Music] tip is terrible for this it's not delivering any heat or any power into the joint so let's try one of the different cartridges [Music] and no we just can't get the power into the joint although the tip does appear to be making good thermal contact it's almost like the thermocouple in the tip or the temperature sensor isn't well bonded to the tip itself so you can see we're only delivering about 13 watts and it's just not melting or anything so we've got a different one of our pcbs here this is a high thermal capacity pad with the gold pads and let's see how this behaves so we'll get plenty of solder on the tip so it's making really good thermal contact so you can see this is now surrounded flooded by solder we're only delivering as you can see up here about 11 Watts and it's starting to struggle it's slowing down on me quite heavily yeah that's about as fast as I can move it through there now the soldier 9 is still reading 350 degrees C I'm just looking at the OLED now so it's still saying 350 but it's clearly not at the tip so it looks like these soldering cartridges are just not very well designed let's just quickly once again compare it with the metcal and just see how different the power delivery is with that system right so we've got the metcal powder let's see what happens when we put Power into one of these pads you can just see the massive difference it's just swallowing as much solder as I can feed into it huge amounts of power being delivered into the pad it's saying 80 Watts obviously there are a few inefficiencies but yeah a completely different story when you use a higher power station with better designed cartridges to deliver heat into one of these situations [Music] [Music] [Music] so there we go that's the pine seal version 2. so Soldier 9 and as we saw the performance isn't that great so it works fine for general purpose through-hole soldering with the cartridge that came provided with it but these other cartridges that I bought from the same supplier in the original Pine seal packaging these cartridges just don't seem to perform the first cartridge that we did the coin test with was a 2.4 millimeter chisel tip and that should be able to deliver plenty of heat into any kind of soldier joint and you saw even though it's surrounded by solder the power being delivered into it was only about 10 or 12 Watts so really poor performance from that I think that's a problem with the cartridge uh possibly with where the temperature sensor or thermocouple is located but it just doesn't have good bonding to the cartridge which is a bit of a problem really because if there's no variety of tips available from any other supplier then this really limits how good this Soldier 9 is ever going to be because there's only so much you can do with a fine conical tip after that you need beefier cartridges this second cartridge which is kind of a flat cartridge did a little bit better still not as good I don't think as even the mini wear ts101 so yeah that's my problem with this soldering iron is just that these cartridges don't seem to be very good and you can't buy cartridge just from anyone else so you're really limited to just a bit of general purpose soldering and nothing too heavy having said that the design is quite nice and there is quite a lot in terms of hackability you can modify the firmware on this device change the PID parameters and all that kind of stuff and it is extremely inexpensive so if you are looking for kind of a portable Soldier 9 for occasional soldering this one could do the trick and it's very nicely priced compared to the miniware but the mini wear just seems to work better and then obviously a proper desktop Soldier 9 will do infinitely better than this at general purpose soldering tasks so that's just my view let me know your thoughts and comments in the comments section down below big thanks to jlc PCB for sponsoring this video and if you want to get some boards like this made don't forget to visit them to get them manufactured big thank you to my patreon supporters and until next time thanks for watching