Category: TØØLS

Here’s the obligatory thermal camera hand selfie

  • October 11, 2022
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
A human hand as viewed by a FLIR ONE Pro infrared camera dongle for Android phones. Temperature measurements with K-type thermocouple probes (to which I alluded in a previous entry: Hardwired auto-off sucks. Don’t build it into tools/instruments you design.) are useful, but you’ll only get readings at the precise locations where you place the […]

Hardwired auto-off sucks. Don’t build it into tools/instruments you design.

  • October 1, 2022
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Testing TØØLS
Hardwiring an auto-off feature into a measurement tool or instrument, like a digital thermometer, is dumb and bad. Don’t do it. Providing it as an option is probably useful in a lot of cases, but turning a tool off after an arbitrarily chosen length of time is dumb and bad. Five-minute-and-change-long clip of two DJI […]

Some smaller HOPs

  • August 23, 2022
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
I like my Wera 42-piece 8100 SA 2 Zyklop Speed Ratchet Set [1/4″ drive, metric] and it sees a fair bit of professional-amateur tinkerer usage, particularly the included 8784 A1 Zyklop bit adaptor, 1/4″ (05003529001), with hex-inner or Torx drive bits. Often, though, I’ve had to dig out a separate bit assortment to get a […]

Ugly, but it works: DIY Lightbulb-grabber because we couldn’t find one locally or get one shipped from the Mainland

  • March 10, 2022
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Contrivances The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Once upon a time, this was a water bottle. The light bulb in our storeroom blew back in February. The ceiling in that room is high enough that replacing the bulb from a stool isn’t do-able and the layout of our place (little doorways, narrow hall, and tight corners) makes maneuvering the fiberglass stepladder ladder […]

Got some stubby bits ([JTC-7801] 78 PCS DOUBLE END MINI RATCHET BIT SET)

  • March 9, 2022
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Side-by-side comparison of the H4 bit that came with the low-profile, offset, ratcheting screwdriver (below) and the one from the JTC-7801 set (above). I bid you welcome to an exciting follow-up to a late-January post: Stubby bits for low-profile offset ratcheting screwdrivers. A few months back, I got a couple of low-profile, offset, ratcheting screwdrivers […]

Deep sockets and feeler, radius, and pin gauges

  • February 1, 2022
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS Tygers, Tygers!
Wera 05004525001 Belt A Deep 1 Socket Spanner Set (1/4 Inch). Plus a 4mm deep socket purchased separately. Deep sockets are one of those tools that, every so often, I could’ve really used but managed to get along without. So I got a , Wera’s 05004525001 deep socket set (1/4-inch drive). It’s got 9 pieces, […]

Stubby bits for low-profile offset ratcheting screwdrivers

  • January 28, 2022
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
This is the bent-up-end offset ratcheting screwdriver. The Japanese company‘s name, Rubicon, is translated into Chinese as Robinhood. With a specific task in mind, I recently got a couple of low-profile, offset, ratcheting screwdrivers. The kind that accept hex-shank bits. Specifically, two Japanese Rubicon brand jobbies: RGH-9A (straight and flat) and RGH-9B (bent-up at the […]

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.

Storage shelf mitosis

  • April 28, 2021
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Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Measuring the shelf upright, trying to figure out the best location for my hacksaw cut. Storage, storage, storage. Utterly tedious, once you’ve made your plan and purchased the storage hardware, and yet at the same time so necessary. Recently, I erected some shelving in our storage room (which was actually intended as the bedroom for […]