Electronic tweezers – the kind that can test the voltage between two contacts, the resistance of an SMD resistor, or the capacitance of a circuit – are very cool and very useful if somewhat expensive. We’ve seen commercial versions of these smart tweezers, hacks to make them more useful, and homebrew versions that still work very well. All of these versions are pretty large, as far as tweezers go. [kodera2t]’s version of electronic tweezers submitted for this year’s Hackaday Prize goes in the other direction: it’s the smallest set of electronic tweezers that’s still useful.
[kodera]’s electronic sensing tweezers only measure capacitors, and for good reason: chip caps usually don’t have values printed on them. These tweezers don’t print out the value of a cap on a display, either. Instead, these tweezers just flash an LED if the value of the cap is above 0.1uF. It’s simple, but surprisingly useful for most soldering jobs.
The circuit for this pair of magical tweezers is about as simple as if can get, with all the smarts contained in a very small ATtiny10. The PCB [kodera] designed is smaller than the coin cell battery, and with the help of some copper tape and possibly an insulator, this device can be mounted to any pair of tweezers. It’s a simple tool, yes, but that’s the beauty of it, and makes for a great entry into the Hackaday Prize
Now we just need some bright spot to make a “talking” version of this and we’ll be off to the races!
What we really need is one that will measure what the capacitance used to be before it went short circuit. :)
I’d prefer a led bar or rgb leds. With a pot you shift the thresold to the wanted value, then the led flashes green if it is right, red if not.
Or perhaps use the color coding of resistors modified for capacitor values to light a couple of RGB leds, but for the same real estate a small LCD display may be easier…
We got tweezers that do all this and more.
It’s called smart tweezers. Don’t see to point of that tool.
I will make beyond “smart tweezers” ;-) (actually already ongoing…) Stay tune!
Yes. And you can even find tweezers adapters for multimeters. I find them even more useful, because they can measure things like voltage to check the supply is ok over the decoupling capacitor.
Could be useful.
Smart tweezers are 15$ incl. shipping from China! No need to fire up the iron.
How does it perform in circuit?