Is Your TS80 Soldering Iron Too Quiet? Turn It Into a Music Player!
As it turns out, you can play music on that TS80 soldering iron of yours.
Everyone needs a soldering iron, and so the market is flooded with options to accommodate every price point. There have been few, if any, individual models that truly standout—you probably don’t even know your own soldering iron model. The one is exception is the TS80, which is relabeled and sold under many different brand names. It’s become very popular thanks to its portability, performance, and reasonable price. As it turns out, you can also turn your TS80 soldering iron into a music player.
The TS80 mini soldering iron ranges in price from about $75 to $100. It’s powered by a standard USB power supply, has a handy OLED screen, and temperature adjustment controls all crammed into a compact package. Swapping out tips is also very easy, thanks to the unique connectors used. What you probably didn’t know is that it can also play music. Those connectors are actually 3.5mm phone jacks, just like you have on your headphones. Joric managed to utilize that jack to play music from the soldering.
There are, of course, some limitations here. The audio output is only monaural, because only one “channel” is connected internally inside of the TS80 as it’s really only meant for the thermocouple to monitor temperature. That means you’ll only get sound from one headphone or speaker. There also isn’t a DAC in the TS80 (why would there be?), which means the audio output is generated with PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) from the soldering iron’s integrated STM32 microcontroller. Still, you can upload hex files to the TS80 in order to play simple synthesized music. It’s not much better than your first Nokia cellphone’s ringtone, but it is music coming from a soldering iron!