Tool Hacks

2969 Articles

Soldering Practice Kit Remains Useful After Completion

September 26, 2020 by 18 Comments

Unsatisfied with the standard fare of soldering practice kits that offer little to no purpose once they’re built, [Jim Heaney] decided to take matters into his own hands and design an easy-to-assemble kit for his class that, once put together, becomes the handiest of tools in any maker’s workbench: a functional voltmeter.

At the heart of the kit is a standard Atmega 328P microcontroller. While he could’ve picked something smaller or cheaper, not only does the bulky part make for easier soldering, [Jim] reasons that it’s a chip that’s easy to repurpose should his students want to build something like a breadboard Arduino, for example. The voltmeter has a fixed measurement range from 0 to 100 VDC, the only switches on the board are for powering it on and a hold button, which freezes the value currently being shown in the three-digit, seven-segment display.

Along with selling his kit to other makers and educators, [Jim] also hopes that his project encourages others to design similar soldering kits which favor some sort of function rather than getting binned once there’s solder on all the pads, as well as part variety and documentation. If you’re on the other end of the soldering spectrum, then why not challenge your skills soldering on a time limit?

Cheap Current Probe Gets Good Review

September 26, 2020 by 13 Comments

A current probe isn’t a very common fixture on most workbenches because they are pretty expensive. [VoltLog] looks at a fairly inexpensive current probe from Micsig. He seemed impressed with the workmanship and it looks similar to more expensive offerings. There are two models with different bandwidth numbers (800 kHz and 2 MHz). It can measure current on a 10A and 100A scale.

According to [VoltLog] comparable probes from other vendors are more expensive and have lower bandwidth. He also liked that the device powers from USB since most newer scopes will have a USB port available.

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Building A Compact Reflow Oven With Halogen Lamps

September 25, 2020 by 7 Comments

Very often, particularly on the Internet, we’re fooled into thinking bigger is always better. The fact remains that this isn’t always the case. When it comes to reflow ovens, for example if you’re working with short runs of small PCBs, or if you just don’t have a lot of space in the workshop, a smaller oven will be more desirable than a large one. It’s factors like these that drove [Sergi Martínez]’s latest build.

Built inside a metal project case, first attempts involved using an off-the-shelf heating element, with poor results. The element had a high thermal inertia, and was designed for use in water, so didn’t last in the reflow application. Learning from the experience of others, [Sergi] switched to using halogen lamps, netting much greater success. An Arduino Nano is responsible for running the show, using firmware developed by [0xPIT]. There’s also a screen for monitoring reflow profiles, and a cooling fan to help keep temperature in the ideal zone.

It’s a tidy build that would be particularly useful for quickly running batches of small PCBs without the long wait times required to heat a larger oven. Energy efficiency should be better, too. Of course, if you’re a fan of the classic toaster oven builds, we’ve got those too. Video after the break.

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In Praise Of The DT830, The Phenomenal Instrument You Probably Don’t Recognise For What It Is

September 24, 2020 by 132 Comments

If we had to make a guess at the single piece of electronic bench equipment owned by the highest proportion of Hackaday readers, it would not be a budget oscilloscope from Rigol, nor would it be a popular portable soldering iron like the TS100. Instead we’re guessing that it’s a multimeter, and not even the most accomplished one.

The DT830 is a genericised Chinese-manufactured 3.5 digit digital multimeter that can be had for an astonishingly low price. Less than a decent hamburger gets you an instantly recognisable plastic case with a chunky rotary range selector switch, and maybe a socket for some kind of transistor or component tester. Make sure that there is a 9 volt battery installed, plug in the pair of test leads, and you’re in business for almost any day-to-day electrical or electronic measurement. They’ve been available in one form or another for decades and have been the subject of innumerable give-aways and loss-leader offers, so it’s a reasonsble guess that you’ll have one somewhere. I have three as far as I know, they make great on-the-go instruments and have proved themselves surprisingly reliable for what they are. Continue reading “In Praise Of The DT830, The Phenomenal Instrument You Probably Don’t Recognise For What It Is” →

How To Create Hermetically Sealed Electrical Connections

September 23, 2020 by 25 Comments

[Eric Strebel] is no stranger to pressure and vaccum tanks, regularly using them for all manner of resin casting jobs for his product design business. However, sometimes it becomes necessary to run equipment within a pressure tank, such as for rotomoulding or other similar jobs. In order to get power into a tank under pressure, [Eric] built a special plug with a hermetic seal to do the job. (Video, embedded below.)

The build starts with a large metal plug which screws into the pressure vessel, into which a square recess is machined. For the electrical passthrough, [Eric] selected GX-16 aviation connectors, in this case packing six conductors. The connectors are hooked up back-to-back through the hole in the metal tank plug, using bare copper wire. This is to avoid insulation on wires acting as a channel for gases to pass through. With the connectors wired up and an acrylic disc in place to stop overflow, the metal plug is filled with resin to create the hermetic seal.

Results are good, with the connectors functioning electrically and the resin acting as a perfect seal. There’s a small risk of short circuit with the exposed copper conductors, but [Eric] is exploring some easy solutions to avoid issues. We’ve seen his work before, too – like this great discussion on cardboard as a design tool. Video after the break.

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This DIY Drill Press Is Very Well Executed

September 22, 2020 by 22 Comments

Plenty of projects we see here could easily be purchased in some form or other. Robot arms, home automation, drones, and even some software can all be had with a quick internet search, to be sure. But there’s no fun in simply buying something when it can be built instead. The same goes for tools as well, and this homemade drill press from [ericinventor] shows that it’s not only possible to build your own tools rather than buy them, but often it’s cheaper as well.

This mini drill press has every feature we could think of needing in a tool like this. It uses off-the-shelf components including the motor and linear bearing carriage (which was actually salvaged from the Z-axis of a CNC machine). The chassis was built from stock aluminum and bolted together, making sure to keep everything square so that the drill press is as precise as possible. The movement is controlled from a set of 3D printed gears which are turned by hand.

The drill press is capable of drilling holes in most materials, including metal, and although small it would be great for precision work. [ericinventor] notes that it’s not necessary to use a separate motor, and that it’s possible to use this build with a Dremel tool if one is already available to you. Either way, it’s a handy tool to have around the shop, and with only a few modifications it might be usable as a mill as well.

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Linkage Inferring Software Handwaves Away The Hard Stuff

September 22, 2020 by 17 Comments

Jokes aside, manually designing linkages that move along specific paths is no easy task. Whether we’re doodling paper sketches or constraining lines in a CAD program, we still need to do the work of actually “imagining” the linkage design. If only there were some sort of tool that would do all that hard imagining work for us! Thankfully, we’re in luck! That’s exactly what researchers [Gen Nishida], [Adrien Bousseau2], and [Daniel G. Aliaga1] at Purdue have done. They’ve designed a software tool that lets us position important bodies in space in particular “key” frames, and then the software simply fills in the linkage for you!

To start the design process, the user inputs a few candidate locations that their solid bodies need to reach in the final linkage path.  From here, these locations get fed to a particle filter. This particle filter seeds thousands of semi-random linkage configurations at small timesteps, selects some of the best-matching ones that most closely approximate the required body locations, removes the lesser-scoring results, re-creates a new set of possible joint configurations based on the best matching ones, and repeats until the tool converges on a linkage that respects our input key frames.

Like a brute force search, this solution takes lots and lots of samples to find a solution, but unlike a brute force search, trials iteratively improve, enabling the software to converge closer and closer to a final solution. Under the hood, the software needs to actually simulate these candidate linkage in order to grade them. It’s in this step that the team wrote in additional checks to remove impossible linkages like self-intersecting joints from this linkage “gene pool” before reseeding them. The result is a tool that does all that trial-and-error scratchwork for you–no brain cycles. For more details, have a peek at their (open access!) paper.

Design software that augments our mechanical design capabilities is a rare gem on these pages, and this one is no exception. If your curious to play with other useful linkages simulating tools, have a go at Linkage Designer. And if you’re in the mood for other tools that fill in the blanks, check out this machine learning algorithm that literally fills in footage between frames in a video feed.

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