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Ralim
IronOS
C2017–2026
Ralim / IronOS

IronOS

Open Source Soldering Iron firmware

Hardware & Embedded
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
17Distinct people
22Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
8.4KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Open Source Soldering Iron firmware

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

Oh boy, nice idea, but this looks complicated and time consuming. I recommend to get some good equipment first: - solder fume extractor (see below) - extra thin high quality…

sandreas used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year22 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2017-07-25 21:15:49 UTC to 2026-09-03 15:37:00 UTC.

02462017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 1 submissions, 6 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC716
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303

What Hacker News says

22 sources
sandreas·Sep 3, 2026
While soldering is not that hard, different tasks require different tools. Most of them can be from very cheap to very expensive. As a beginner I'd recommend the following: A small USB-C soldering iron supported by IronOS[1], e.g. Pinecil vor TS100 A solid stand with brass wool A KU soldering tip (looks a bit like a knife) for good heat transfer, too small tips are not good Thin (<=0.5mm) solder wire No clean flux (not a pen) Isopropyl alcohol Solder fume extractor (DIY is OK, if you're building it right) is good for your health Solder mat (blue silicone) Multimeter (not too cheap, around 20 bucks) Self closing tweezers Normal tweezers A wirecutter (blue 5 bucks from ali express) Manual Desoldering pump (engineer ss03 or a clone for cheaper) Most important is cleaning (alcohol, then flux) and heat transfer (tin your tip, your pads or your
Read the rest
wire before putting things together to ensure good heat transfer). Cleanup nicely and tin your tip after soldering to prevent corrosion. Optional but helpful for more professional tasks: Hot air station Auto Desoldering pump (ZD-8965) Adjustable power supply (fnirsi usbc, 30 bucks) Oscilloscope (mini beginner with display Cost around 30 bucks) Capton tape Solid Copper wire 1: https://github.com/Ralim/IronOS
In Ask HN: Resources to get good at soldering?
sandreas·May 12, 2026
Starting with soldering, I find these 200$+ recommendations (regardless of which tool) hard to justify. # Soldering iron I'd recommend the Pinecil V2 with IronOS. https://github.com/Ralim/IronOS # Solder fume extraction I've built a simple fume extraction with an old plastic case, a 120mm fan and a sheet of carbon filter attached to a 120mm dryer / air conditioning hose. Around 15$ and good enough for soldering from time to time. # "Microscope" I simply use a strong (10x) magnifier glass with a LED ring (around 15$ on Amazon). I can't tell you how often I also used this thing for other purposes. # Desoldering Pump Because I needed it (beginners won't) I bought a ZD-8965 for 100 bucks and I'm very happy with this thing. I have whole list of cheap beginner to intermediate equipment, that'll do until you solder (semi) professionally.
In I hate soldering
fellerts·Jan 30, 2024
So apparently the Pinecil is a BLE-enabled soldering iron with a 108 MHz RISC-V processor running a custom real-time operating system [0]. The author wanted to access the UART logs, so they repurposed a Raspberry Pi Pico (a dual-core microcontroller system running a real-time OS) for the task. That's a staggering amount of hardware, sortware and computing power devoted to decoding one of the simplest and oldest serial protocols from a device whose sole purpose is to essentially melt tin. Maybe I'm out of touch, but I think I'll stick to my thermostat-controlled Weller soldering station and FTDI UART converters. I apologize if this post comes across as snarky, my point is that these are solved problems and have been for half a century. [0] https://github.com/Ralim/IronOS
In Accessing the Pinecil UART with Picoprobe
jorisd·Aug 1, 2023
This is a project which builds firmware for multiple devices and processor architectures, supporting developers running various operating systems locally, and includes support for documentation generation and firmware localization. It doesn't sound too strange to me that such a project includes a decent amount of tooling to ensure that compiling things is accessible for a layperson, and ensure a healthy influx of community and corporate contributions which don't diminish software quality. None of the dependencies mentioned in the Dockerfile [1] really seem out of place, to me, and I don't think the documentation generation or checkstyle packages are critical to compiling the firmware. Besides, you can always treat a built Docker image as a stable toolchain archive if that's a concern; there's little reason to assume that it won't work 12
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years into the future as - as far as I can tell - none of the software relies on it being run inside a Docker container. [1] https://github.com/Ralim/IronOS/blob/80c4b58976268849b6d1c8d...
In IronOS: Open-source soldering iron firmware
nyanpasu64·Jun 14, 2023
I wouldn't want a USB-based Picoprobe debugger or logic analyzer to depend on (or even use?) wireless connectivity. And for a low-latency game controller adapter which translates between wired NES/SNES, N64/GC, and/or USB protocols, converting a regular controller to a Bluetooth controller is quite an invasive change which requires adding batteries to the device, and increases input latency/unreliability when you're using a wireless connection, so many adapters don't bother with networking. In terms of whether WiFi or Bluetooth is a wise idea (as opposed to being cool or useful), I find that wireless/networked protocols are easier to get wrong than simpler configuration. I have a video scaler (GBS-Control) which exposes a network-based interface over the ESP8266's Wi-Fi adapter. The IP address it picks up in my LAN is random, and though y
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ou can visit gbscontrol.local to resolve the URL using mDNS, this is unsupported on older versions of Android. And in certain video modes, the video circuitry interferes with the wireless signal, causing network requests to stall indefinitely. In my observation, networking is especially prone to race conditions. If I toggle my power strip and power on both the ESP8266 and my router at the same time, the ESP8266 boots before the router, fails to connect to the router (remembered by PersWiFiManager), and decides to expose its own access point and never reconnect to the existing router afterwards. Worst of all, the web server used runs networking code in the yield() callback, leading it to handle network requests in the middle of I2C communication call stacks and possibly overflow the stack. It's also known to corrupt heap memory when concurrent HTTP requests occur (https://github.com/me-no-dev/ESPAsyncWebServer/issues/324 was closed by a bot without a solution). I found an concurrency footgun where the server allows HTTP callbacks to ask the server to reply with a SPIFFS file handle, but you can reopen and write to the file in subsequent code after the HTTP callback finishes, but before the server finishes streaming data from the file handle. This results in corrupted data being sent to the HTTP client. I also heard that the Pinecil V2 released with a Bluetooth Low Energy compatible microcontroller, but the wireless-enabled firmware apparently malfunctions on certain irons and causes them to fail to boot (https://github.com/Ralim/IronOS/issues/1661), though this may be fixed over time.
In OnBoard – A New Grants Program to Fund $100 in PCB Costs for Teenagers
adql·May 4, 2023
If the end result is the same you're just wasting components that already are builtin into most microcontroller. And you'd need to remember to not use autonomous part of microcontroller (like a timer output) to implement it. Considering the connected net is named "tip_control" I'd assume its PWM that is fed into MOSFET controlling the heater... and in vast majority of cases that PWM will happily run when core is hanged. Looking at datasheet of the microcontroller PA6 does indeed go to tip_control and one of alternate functions is TIMER2_CH0, and at least glancing at code /* enable TIMER1 - PWM control timing*/ timer_enable(TIMER1); timer_enable(TIMER2); ... https://github.com/Ralim/IronOS/blob/1fbcdcdf987a28541524e4f... ... timer_init(TIMER2, &timer_initpara); /* CH0 configuration in PWM mode0 */ timer_channel_ou
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tput_struct_para_init(&timer_ocintpara); timer_ocintpara.outputstate = TIMER_CCX_ENABLE; timer_ocintpara.outputnstate = TIMER_CCXN_DISABLE; timer_ocintpara.ocpolarity = TIMER_OC_POLARITY_HIGH; ... they are using it for PWM. The watchdog itself also appears to be enabled tho, so there is a chance it will kill itself the normal way
In FET: The Friendly Efficient Transistor
sandreas·Jan 6, 2023
I just realized what a huge amount of stuff i bought in 2022 :-) - G3 Ferrari pizza oven with this tutorial[1] for original neapolitan pizza - INIU BI-B63 25000 mAh Powerbank with 65W to charge my notebook - TS 100 / Pinecil [2] soldering iron with open firmware [3] - Baseus quad port 100W USB-C power supply (CCGAN100US) - $5 Sinilink USB switch with wifi and open firmware [4] - GL.iNet GL-MT1300 (Beryl) Travel Router with OpenWRT firmware - Bühnen HB250 hot glue gun - 10m velcro cable tie - VAFOTON magnetic usb-c cable (USB-C Magsafe with 100W PD) - $100 WLToys 959-B 1/18 RC Car with 70km/h / 43mph (aliexress) - ANBERNIC RG353M retro handheld console (aliexpress) [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-jPoROGHGE [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eme_AUayLp8 [3]: https://github.com/Ralim/IronOS [4]: https://templates.blakadder.com/sinil
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ink_XY-WFUSB.html
In Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022
sandreas·Sep 27, 2022Recommendation phrase
Oh boy, nice idea, but this looks complicated and time consuming. I recommend to get some good equipment first: - solder fume extractor (see below) - extra thin high quality tin - a desoldering pump AND desoldering wire - high quality flux - a TS 100 soldering Iron with KU tip from ali express for 50 bucks - optional: USB-C Power Adapter for your existing power supply (so you don't have to buy one) - optional: a soldering mat (normaly blue colored) and you have a near professional equipment for about $120. Now flash IronOS[1] on your soldering Iron, and it works even better. Instructions: - turn on solder fume extractor - heat iron to 370° Celsius (but be careful depending on your workpiece) - Tin both ends beforhand - better slightly more flux to put on (but not for small works) - if flux has been applied, clean
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ing up with e.g. toothbrush & isopropyl alcohol after you're done maybe a good idea However, the most important peace of hardware is a solder fume extractor... I'm surprised that so many youtube "professionals" don't put a hint on this - never play with your health. This can even be done DIY (see youtube tutorials). High quality flux is also important because of your health. Chinese sellers often don't care about ingredients... High quality tin is much easier to work with and costs 5 bucks more than low quality tin. It is worth. [1]: https://github.com/Ralim/IronOS
In Soldering Wires – Here's a different way

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