One of the most interesting soldering irons
I like my tools relatively small but also demand good build quality. The TS100 is a minimalistic soldering iron which even has a build in Microcontroller. Furthermore, it even can be updated over microUSB. Surprisingly the price is acceptable for such a device.
There are a huge ton of soldering stations on the market. But these need a lot of space and are often more pricey. Thus, I searched for a rather minimal sized soldering iron. There exist some cheap irons which have a low power rating. These are often not good enough for real soldering jobs. After some digging I found the ts100 on AliExpress. Besides the mircoUSB Port for data there is also a power port for high current. The device features a low resolution monochrome OLED Display and one soldering tip. The tips can be removed by one tiny hex head screw.
To get the best performance from the ts100, it's recommended to use a power adapter which is able to deliver 65W (or more). The soldering iron can heat up very quickly to its maximum temperature of 450 degrees, if a powerful adapter is used. For simple data delivery a standard USB A to microUSB cable is sufficient.
I mentioned in the beginning that the iron holds its own microcontroller. To be more precise it's an STM32F103 Microcontroller by STMicroelectronics, which is based on the ARMv7-M architecture. Thus, it even has the processing power to process software implemented PID controls. Such a complex firmware is publicly and freely available at GitHub. It's called IronOS and features multiple functions which the standard software does not support. Detailed instruction of the flashing process are also available there.
All in all I am rather satisfied with this tool. Of course, if you want a real soldering station and do not care about size, this may not be the right soldering iron for you. But everyone else should be more than happy to get such a brilliant device for just 50 bucks.