I just got the Tenma hot air station from Farnell for ~111 pounds. I just put on a 24 QFN easily, no worries. I have a lot of experience with hot air rework though, using an Oki brand one. Both had heat and airspeed settings. Basically, just get one with all the knobs and maybe a digital display (the Tenma one has one actually! awesome). Came with 4 different air nozzle tips too
I just had a brain fart about the use of Open drain output devices.. if you have a resister array of pull-ups, and feed the signals into for example a Hex inverter buffer, you have a 'logical' and good signal on the output! What I mean is, changing what is an "active low" to an "active high" using inverting buffers. I wish I knew this ages ago in my undergrad final project :(