Nowadays you can find a ton of portable soldering irons in the marker. The main selling point of all of them, compared to old-style soldering irons, is that they are temperature-controllable and can be powered from battery packs of PD-compatible power banks or charges, making them truly portable. TS100 and TS80 from Miniware and the open-source soldering iron Pinecil from pine64 are the most popular among them. And one more similarity is that they all use Hakko-compatible or similar types of soldering tips. Now there is a new kid in the block, a new open-source soldering iron - called the solder ninja pen. The key feature of the solder ninja pen is that it is compatible with the hot-swappable RT Tip series tips from Weller.
The Solder Ninja Pen, designed by Nicolas Schurando of Sitron Labs, is capable of delivering up to 45W of power. The solder ninja pen comes in an anodized machined aluminium body and features a 0.69-inch 96 × 16 px Monochrome OLED display and two tactile buttons for temperature control and configuration. Inside the solder ninja pen uses an RP2040 microcontroller as its brain and LIS2DH12 accelerometer from STMicroelectronics for movement detection. Apart from the accelerometer, the solder ninja pen also features a magnet sensor for detecting the stand. This will help to improve the soldering tip’s life. As per the makers, the solder ninja pen can heat up to 350℃ within 4 seconds at 45W. If we come to the physical dimensions the solder ninja pen measures about 85 × 15 mm without tip and 160 × 15 mm with tip. Schurando started a Crowdsupply campaign for the solder ninja pen and it is yet to be launched. The schematic is already available in this GitHub repository. Even though there is no mention of the firmware, it looks like the solder ninja pen uses a modified version of Ralim’s IronOS.
