Evan's RE Blog

A space for my projects. Send me a mail if you find this interesting :)

The NuWave personal SMT reflow oven

My wife and I are the proud owners of this mini convection oven, a nuwave pro plus. Well, we actually haven't touched it since receiving it as a gift over 2 years ago, so I thought I could try cracking it open and repurposing it.

I think it could make a good oven for SMT reflow. I haven't got it working yet, so maybe I'm wrong!

Teardown

Super easy, no more than 20 standard screws and I had access to the internals. The oven has a number of components:

The silkscreen is super helpful with almost everything labeled!

The microcontroller is an 8-bit Zilog S3F8S19, and the header for flashing firmware is still populated.

Firmware

So getting the firmware would be a lovely next step. I hope it's possible, since my modifications won't be too far from original functionality. I still want an oven, after all.

The flash interface is proprietary to Zilog S3 micros, but at least they provide a specification. It describes a protocol inspired by I2C, but different enough where I'll probably have to bit-bang the whole thing. I have a lovely LPC4330 devboard that I hope to use the built-in I2C device, but if it's too finnicky I'll just fall back to bit-banging.

If the read protection is set, I'm not sure what the best next step would be. If you have any experience with glitching these micros or otherwise cirumventing the read protection please let me know: evan at re4 dot fun.