A Simple One-Handed Solder Feeder

July 27, 2023 by Lewin Day 46 Comments

Soldering can get frustrating when you’re working fast. It often feels like you don’t have enough hands, particularly on jobs where you need to keep feeding solder in a hurry. To solve that issue, [mulcmu] developed a simple one-handed solder feeder.

The solder is fed out of the tip by simply dragging it with the thumb.

The intended use-case is for busy work like soldering long pin headers. The one-handed device allows solder to be continually fed while the other hand uses the soldering iron. It solves a long-running problem for [mulcmu], after their experiments with techniques inspired by TIG welding came to nought.

The design uses a pen-like form factor. A 3D-printed hollow tube has a wire ferrule inserted in the end, which serves as the tip of the device through which solder is fed. The tube has a cutaway, which allows the user to feed solder through using an easy motion of the thumb. The solder itself is fed from a spool in a regular bench top holder. If more slack is required in the solder feed, one simply pins the solder down in the device and tugs to draw more out.

If you find yourself regularly soldering repetitive jobs by hand, this could be a gamechanger for you. Those working in through-hole would be perhaps best served by this device. Meanwhile, if you’ve got nifty tool hacks of your own to share, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Workshop Dust Manifold Spreads The Suction Around

July 26, 2023 by Lewin Day 15 Comments

Let’s say you’re doing lots of woodwork now, and you’ve expanded your workshop with a few big tools. You’re probably noticing the sawdust piling up awfully quick. It would be ideal to have some kind of collection system, but you don’t want to buy a shop vac for every tool. This simple manifold from [Well Done Tips] is the perfect solution for you.

It’s a basic rig at heart, but nonetheless a useful one. It consists of a plywood frame with a shuttle that slides back and forth. The suction hose of your shop vac attaches to the shuttle. Meanwhile, the frame has a series of pipes leading to the dust extraction ports of your various tools around the shop. When you power up a tool, simply slide the manifold to the right position, and you’re good to go. Magnets will hold it in place so it doesn’t get jostled around while you work.

It’s a much cheaper solution than buying a huge dust extraction system that can draw from all your tools at once. If you’re just one person, that’s overkill anyway. This solution is just about sized perfectly for small home operators. Give it a go if you’re tired of sweeping up the mess and coughing your lungs out on the regular. Video after the break.

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A wooden spin coating machine sitting on a desk

Hackaday Prize 2023: Homebrew Spin Coater Makes Micrometer-Thin Layers

July 26, 2023 by Robin Kearey 10 Comments

One of the great things about the Gearing Up challenge of the 2023 Hackaday Prize is that it lets you discover tools that you don’t encounter every day. We had never given much thought to spin coaters, for example, until we saw [Jeroen Delcour]’s neat homebrew example. As it turns out, spin coating has lots of applications in fields like optics, semiconductor manufacturing or even art projects, where a thin, even layer of a material is required on top of a flat substrate.

The basic idea behind a spin coater is simple: you dispense a few drops of a solution containing the material to be deposited on top of the thing you want to coat, then spin the thing around at a constant speed. The balance between the centripetal force and the liquid’s surface tension ensures that the liquid turns into a film with a consistent thickness all across the substrate. The solvent evaporates, and you’re left with a nice solid layer just a few microns thick.

[Jeroen] built his spin coater out of a brushless DC drone motor, a programmable motor controller, and an ESP32. A rotary pushbutton and an OLED form the user interface, allowing the user to select the speed and spin times. The electronics are all mounted inside a laser-cut wooden enclosure, with the motor sticking out the top, surrounded by a 3D-printed splash guard.

Professional spin coating equipment typically comes with a vacuum chuck to hold the sample in place, but [Jeroen] wasn’t too excited about implementing vacuum systems on a spinning platform and decided instead to simply clamp down the sample using screws in a laser-cut piece of acrylic. This works well enough, and is easy to customize for different sample sizes.

In the video embedded below, [Jeroen] experiments with applying a layer of silicone rubber onto a PCB. Spin coating is an essential step when you’re making your own semiconductor devices such as solar cells, though you might also need more complicated equipment such as an electron microscope. [Jeroen]’s spin coater is at least able to process much larger objects than one we saw earlier.

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Digital Microscope With An On-Screen Multimeter

July 19, 2023 by Al Williams 18 Comments

Some things go together, like chocolate and peanut butter. Others are more odd pairings, like bananas and bacon. We aren’t sure which category to put [IMSAI Guy]’s latest find in. He has a microscope with a built-in digital multimeter. You can see the video of the device in operation below.

The microscope itself is one of those unremarkable ten-inch LCD screens with some lights and a USB camera. But it also has jacks for test probes, and the display shows up in the corner of the screen. It is a normal enough digital meter except for the fact that its display is on the screen.

If you had to document test results, this might be just the ticket. If you are probing tiny little SMD parts under the scope, you may find it useful, too, so you don’t have to look away from what you are working on when you want to take a measurement. Although for that, you could probably just have a normal display in the bezel, and it would be just as useful.

At about $180 USD, it’s not exactly an impulse buy. We wonder if we’ll someday see an oscilloscope microscope. That might be something. These cheap microscopes are often just webcams with additional optics. You can do the same thing with your phone. If you don’t need the microscope, but you like the idea, can we interest you in a heads-up meter?

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A Current Sensing Coil That’s Open Ended

July 16, 2023 by Jenny List 9 Comments

One of the joys of writing for Hackaday comes in learning new things which even after a long engineering background haven’t yet come your way. So it is with the Rogowski coil, an AC current sensing coil which is unlike conventional current transformers in that it’s open ended — in other words not needing to be closed around the conductor it’s measuring. [Weston Braun] has an interesting introduction to the subject, as part of his open source Rogowski coil based current probe.

The project itself is an amplifier and integrator that provides a voltage output proportional to the current sensed by the coil, but the real meat is in discovering the coils themselves. They’re a many-turn coil wound on a flexible former, forming in effect a toroidal inductor with a gap in it when bent into a circle. They’re for high frequencies only though, with the one in this project having a bandwidth from 888 Hz to 25 MHz. We don’t have any immediate need to non-intrusively measure current at those frequencies, but it’s something to know that we could.

This isn’t the first time a Rogowski coil has turned up on Hackaday though, back in 2011 we saw one used to measure a steep current impulse.

A PCB with an OLED display, a screw terminal block and a Raspberry Pi Zero board

Hackaday Prize 2023: Pi Pico Measures Volts, Amps And Watts

July 16, 2023 by Robin Kearey 6 Comments

Measuring a voltage is pretty easy: just place your multimeter’s probes across the relevant pins and read the value. Probing currents is a bit trickier, since you need to open up the circuit and place your probes in series. Checking a circuit’s power consumption is the hardest, since you need to measure both voltage and current as well as multiply them at each moment in time. Fed up with having to hook up two multimeters and running a bunch of synchronized measurements, [Per-Simon Saal] built himself an automatic digital power meter.

The heart of this instrument is an INA219 chip, which can measure and digitize voltage and current simultaneously. It outputs the results through an I2C bus, which [Per-Simon] hooked up to a miniaturized version of the Raspberry Pi Pico called an RP2040-Zero. A screw terminal block is provided to connect the system to the device under test, while a 0.96″ OLED display shows the measured voltage, current and power.

The maximum voltage that can be measured is 26 V, while the current range is determined by the shunt resistor mounted on the board. The default shunt is 0.1 Ω, resulting in a 3.2 A maximum current range, but you can get pretty much any range you want by simply mounting a different resistor and changing the software configuration. In addition to displaying the instantaneous values, the power meter can also keep a log of its measurements – very useful for debugging circuits that use more energy than expected or for measuring things like the capacity of a battery.

There are lots of ways to measure electric power, but they all boil down to multiplying current and voltage in some way. The multiplication was done magnetically in the old days, but modern meters like [Per-Simon]’s of course use digital systems. Some can even plug directly into a USB port. If you want to measure mains power, transformers are an essential component for safety reasons.

Phone Thermal Cameras Get Open Source Desktop Tools

July 11, 2023 by Tom Nardi 14 Comments

Whenever phone-based thermal cameras are brought up here on Hackaday, we inevitably receive some comments about how they’re a bad investment compared to a standalone unit. Sure they might be cheaper, but what happens in a couple years when the app stops working and the manufacturer no longer feels like keeping it updated?

It’s a valid concern, and if we’re honest, we don’t like the idea of relying on some shady proprietary app just to use the camera in the first place. Which is why we’re so excited to see open source software being developed that allows you to use these (relatively) inexpensive cameras on your computer. [Les Wright] recently sent word that he’s been working on a project called PyThermalCamera which specifically targets the TOPDON TC001, which in turn is based on a project called P2Pro-Viewer developed by LeoDJ for the InfiRay P2 Pro.

Readers may recall we posted a review of the P2 Pro last month, and while the compact hardware was very impressive, the official Android software lacked a certain degree of polish. While these projects won’t help you on the mobile front in their current form, it’s good to know there’s at least a viable “Plan B” if you’re unwilling or unable to use the software provided from the manufacturer. Naturally this also opens up a lot of new possibilities for the camera, as being connected to a proper Linux box means you can do all sorts of interesting things with the video feed.

The two video feeds on the left are combined to produce the final thermal image.

Speaking of the video feed, we should say that both of these projects were born out of a reverse engineering effort by members of the EEVblog forums. They figured out early on that the InfiRay (and other similar models) were picked up as a standard USB video device by Linux, and that they provided two video streams: one being a B&W feed from the camera where the relative temperature is used as luminance, and the other containing the raw thermal data cleverly encoded into a green-tinted video. With a little poking they found an FFmpeg one liner that would combine the two streams, which provided the basis for much of the future work.

In the video below, you can see the review [Les] produced for the TOPDON TC001, which includes a demonstration of both the official Windows software and his homebrew alternative running on the Raspberry Pi. Here’s hoping these projects inspire others to join in the effort to produce flexible open source tools that not only unlock the impressive capabilities of these new thermal cameras but save us from having to install yet another smartphone application just to use a device we purchased.

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