For small components use the vacuum tool without any of the rubber tips. Again, this needs a small amount of practice but it means you can lift components straight from the tape.

I set the plate to 180°C with paste dabbed onto the pads with quite a lot to spare and had a very high success rate. Takes about 1 minute to reflow. Some components need a nudge with tweezers while hot if they get attracted to the wrong pad. It’s well worth getting this to work imho.

Oh, but you might want a magnifier with a light as well, that’s also really helpful. Here is a board I assembled recently using the above.

And some low temperature solder paste. It’s then really really easy. amzn.eu/d/ib5wkv0

And a vacuum pickup like this. Rechargeable ESD Vacuum Pen for... www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0D234YZ2...

Top tip. Get yourself a hot plate like this 700W Electric Heating Plate... www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0F1935LN...

So what is it that has to change to make it less brittle? As far as I can see the mesh is fundamentally ok but the way it is used isn’t resilient. My hunch is that there need to be a lot more messaging to check that things are working right and also to take corrective actions if they are not.

Is this while using matter/ thread or zigbee? And with home assistant or apple or google as the hub?

That’s lovely to hear! One of the curious turns of my career was developing an animatronic control system for Jim Henson’s Creature Shop
used on Babe the Pig, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and other films (but that might have been a bit late for your childhood). creatureshop.com/history/

We were selling SWTPC 6800 computers at that time, and amazingl also sold Microsoft basic… when Microsoft corp was 9 months old!! Later on I worked as a member of the operating system team for the BBC Computer implementing the sound interface. Funny old world!

Just like the one France mandated 10 years ago! www.viritopia.com/blog/france-...

So now let’s talk about power consumption. In 1979 the computers we sold possibly used about 200W. My new computer maxes out at 70W for a computer with a million times more computing power, not the 200MW that would have been required.

How extraordinary it all is.

And then to consider storage. We sold twin 800Kb floppy disk drives for about £1000. Call it £1 per Kb. The computer I just bought has 1Tb of storage. So that looks like another £1 billion to add to the cost.

Oh, and the computers we sold were 8 bit @ 1MHz. The computer I bought today has 14 off 32 bit cores @ >4GHz, which is some 200,000 times faster without even considering the instruction set improvements. Oh, and it also has 20 gpu cores so is probably more like a million times faster.

Isn’t the biggest and best use case for lighter panels for use on those large commercial roofs that aren’t able to take the weight of typical panels?

Did you get my email? Cambridge also works well for me.

Apologies. I have just sent you an email,

This lithium AA 2.6Ah 3.6V battery costs £2.60 in volume and has a working life of potentially 20+ years in an iot application www.buyabattery.co.uk/batteries/li...