Hola Robert,

Strictly speaking, I don't think he made the PWB at home. I think he just assembled it at home (a feat not to be dismissed as trivial given the pitch of some of those parts).

Here's a little vernacular lesson if you're interested. A bare circuit board is referred to as a Printed Wiring Board (PWB). Once it is assembled, or has the components installed, it is called a Printed Circuit Board (PCB). The logic is that without the components there is no circuit, just wires. In this case, I believe the guy had the PWB (the bare board) built at a board shop, maybe one of those prototype places on the internet. Nonetheless, it is still an impressive assembly job.

The first time I read about using a toaster oven for reflow was about three years ago. It was an article in a PCB trade magazine. And yes, it really does work well. If you're going to try this, the article made the point that not every toaster oven worked equally well, and ended up recommending a particular model of Black and Decker. It has to do with the thermal profile of the process. The temperature has to heat up at the right rate in order to catalyze the proper reactions in the flux, and then the effluents from the reactions have to burn off thouroughly before the solder paste melts. Anyway, if the oven heats up too fast or too slow it can mess up the works to one degree or another.

I've given some thought to building a thermal profile controller (8052 based) to regulate a toaster oven for this very purpose. But so far it is still one of those "someday" projects.