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Use one for a while. Desktop soldering irons have had sleep features for years -- the temperature relaxes when you put it in the holder (or after it's been in the holder for a while) to reduce tip oxidation, but keep it warm-ish so it'll be back to soldering temperature very quickly when you pick it back up. These are based on a processor, you just don't have access to it as a user, so the timeout and temperature are set by the factory and that's it. There are plenty of soldering irons with a digital display, which allows you to calibrate the temperature response using a simple two-point process, rather than back-and-forth twiddling of the gains of a couple of opamps on the old analog stations. Those were such a pain to calibrate, few folks bothered, and the temperature setpoint on the dial grew increasingly fictional with age. The digital ones are based on a processor, but often the UI is so terrible (two buttons, three digits of 7-segment display) there could be more features back there but nobody would use them. When OLED displays got cheap, that changed things. You can now have high-res text without a huge screen, and finally give someone all the knobs they'd want. Timeouts extend tip life. Calibration is really good and easy. Momentary boost mode for large joints without having to change the setpoint. It's the features you'd find in a thousand-dollar Pace station, in a sub-hundred-dollar portable iron, because all the complexity is in software. And, bonus, since it runs off random DC, you can use any laptop brick you have sitting around, or batteries. They're extremely popular with RC hobbyists for field repairs as a result, and when running from battery you need another feature -- low-input shutdown, so you don't accidentally overdischarge the battery, which can damage it. Yet another feature that costs $0 once the hardware is there. |