[jakedata]

I bought a Pinecil so I could run it off a battery. I really came to appreciate the excellent temperature control and rapid heating, and use it instead of my soldering station for jobs away from the bench.

I have felt absolutely no need to touch the firmware. I try to forget that it is more powerful than my first three personal computers combined. Plug in, turn on, get hot. It meets my needs and exceeded my expectations. I suppose I could run a website from it if I wanted to make a point but as long as it doesn't require wifi and phone home to verify the license and leak my biometric data I expect to use it until I wear it out.

[fancyfredbot]

I saw one useful feature added, which was support for lower resistance tips. You can also get it to report on the input voltage which is marginally useful if running on battery.

Most of it seems to be people having fun. Animations, enabling Bluetooth, web interfaces over aforementioned Bluetooth, etc. That's all pretty cool and hacker news is hardly the place to question why you'd want to do it, but I'll admit I find the number of people interested in hacking on a soldering iron a bit of a surprise!

[dekhn]

Do you run it at 20V or USB 5V? I ask because I found it heated up very slowly at 5V (and had trouble maintaining high heat), while once I got a nice USB PD power supply, it worked very well.

It replaced my weller almost instantly (the weller just inserts heat insert nuts now).

[jakedata]

20v everywhere plus I made up a high power DC power cord with a barrel connector. My company’s marketing department has really nice USB-C power bricks emblazoned with our logo. I also invested in a biggish Anker battery with full USB-PD support.