I use an older Black & Decker Toast R Oven for my prototyping. I have run across people using IR ovens. They do get hotter, faster. The thing is, an IR oven will heat the board but not the air around it. So how do you measure the temp of the board while its cooking? You need to be able to do that in order to maintain a proper reflow temp profile.
With a conventional or convetion over you can measure the air temp. While that is not ideal, since you really do want to know the board temp, its at least easy to do.
I use the oven congroller sold here by SparkFun. It was easy to build and it comes with the software. Not that its hard to do it yourself of course.
with this oven and other IR cooker, the IR don’t hit the board directly because there’s an inox plate (with some holes but not directly under the bulb) below the bulb . The fan inside the perimeter of the bulb push the hot air on the side for the little cyclonic effect. The plate probably radiate some IR too, But I guess it’s more a convection oven than an IR one due to this structure . (I’ll post some pictures later).
For the temperature measures, the thermocouple is below the plate at the middle, where the PCB is supposed to be placed. To limit the possible IR effect, I put some aluminium tape just above the thermocouple like a umbrella. So it’s the temperature of the air that is measured.
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