Category: HerpDerp

Do Not Soak

  • November 12, 2021
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Huh. Didn’t read this label on the bottom of the mug until I’d turned it upside-down to hand-wash the base. This Fallout-themed mug had been sitting in our kitchen sink for a day or so, exposed to water to the extent that, when the tap was used, some water splashed into the basin where the […]

Won’t fly far, fethers [sic] snipped

  • August 8, 2021
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HerpDerp Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Spotted this lost-pet poster for a parrot near a bus shelter early last month and, just now, stumbled across the photo I snapped of it at the time. Hope they found the bird!

Dusty, grimy, sometimes packed in trash, and occasionally short

  • July 2, 2021
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
A pair of NOS gloves that I donned to protect my hands while snipping off lengths of 304 stainless steel mesh. Handling a couple of small rolls of clean-looking SS for a few minutes left them visibly filthy. Buying stuff from merchants in China directly, rather than from a retailer whose stock comes from a […]

This may not have worked (reliably) even if I’d had the pin ordering correct

  • June 11, 2021
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Contrivances HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Here’s a zoomed-in image of my attempt to connect to an SCD41 sensor without soldering wires onto it or cobbling together some sort of jig with pogo pins. I recently got some SCD41 sensors. They report CO2 level in PPM as well as temperature and humidity. They’re also surface-mount, of the LGA variety and small […]

Calibration slides: a boon for measuring small things like the dimensions of solder pads on surface mount components

  • May 28, 2021
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Contrivances HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering TØØLS
One of the calibration slides, with the 1-mm-per-division scale above a new surface-mount CO2 sensor from Sensirion. I hadn’t aligned the start of the scale with the left side of the sensor yet, but it’s 1 centimeter (10mm) square. The trend seems to be that the share of interesting new thingamajigs and doodads available only […]

Hits and a miss, sort-of fixing obliterated solder pads on a PCB

  • May 25, 2021
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Pre-solder-enblobbening photo of my jury-rigged fix for an obliterated solder pad intended for the positive pin of a coin-cell battery holder mounted on the reverse of the PCB. In recent months, I’ve been lending a helping hand to a few people who’ve shown interest in electronics. I’m not an EE or an electronics expert of […]

Success: eliminated as non-optimal one way of soldering wires onto tiny, irregularly-shaped components

  • May 20, 2021
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering Testing TØØLS
Behold, my home workbench. The component I hoped to solder is bathed in the illumination from my microscope’s LED ring light. Tonight, I tried one very simple way of holding an itty bitty, non-flat electronics component and some wires still while I solder the stripped ends of the wires to the pads on the component: […]

Wheels for the wheel-less QUICK 6601

  • April 28, 2021
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HerpDerp Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
The wheeled cart I purchased to make moving my Quick 6601 solder fume extractor and purifier around. Inside the box, newspaper recycled as environmentally-friendly packing material. The wheels were an optional add-on, replacing the default rickety all-plastic casters.

Trying to heat-test some Nitto and Chukoh PTFE adhesive tapes

  • April 7, 2021
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Contrivances HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering TØØLS
The “before” view of my second experimental setup. Three types of PTFE tape, two PTFE-impregnated glass fiber tapes and one straight PTFE tape, all with silicone adhesive, under test. How do you hold components in place while soldering? Not the PCBs on which the components are mounted. PCB holders and PCB vises can be pricey […]

Quick 6601 solder fume extractor and purifier

  • April 3, 2021
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Top of my Quick 6601 solder fume extractor and purifier, with the tethered remote control and not-yet consulted Chinese-language instruction manual resting next to the base of the flexible duct. There wasn’t much assembly involved. One end of the flexible duct slides onto the flange mounted atop the machine and attaching the flared rubber intake […]

Avoid swallowed by children

  • March 29, 2021
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Caution: Avoid swallowed by children. Rinse immediately with water if contact with eyes. We’ve been checking out the labels on the cleaning products, soaps, shampoos, deodorants, etc. that we use, looking for quats or substances that release them. Here’s an article that’ll give you an idea of why: Questioning quats’ safety, published in Chemical & […]

And we’re back.

  • March 29, 2021
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter