Old DSLR Lens Becomes Useful Soldering Magnifier

Soldering tiny stuff is hard, if not impossible, without some optical assistance. [Ad_w00000] was having just this problem, so built himself a soldering magnifier to help.

The magnifier uses a variety of components [Ad_w00000] had lying around. For the optical side of things, an old Canon DSLR zoom lens was pressed into service as the main magnifying element. The lens was then fitted with an old laptop webcam, which was glued into an old lens extender to avoid modifying the main lens itself. The webcam is hooked up to an Asus Tinkerboard fitted with a touchscreen display to show the images. The whole lens assembly is then fitted onto an old TV stand to enable it to sit far enough above the work surface to focus properly.

The build is a great example of building something useful out of whatever you have on hand. Sometimes, that’s cheaper and quicker than spending money and waiting for something to ship. It also has the bonus that you’ll learn useful skills along the way.

We’ve seen other great soldering hacks recently, too, like this gimbal to help steady hand tremors. If you’ve got your own coming together, be sure to let us know!

Soldering Iron Plus Camera Gimbal Helps Cancel Out Hacker’s Hand Tremors

Soldering requires steady hands, so when [Jonathan Gleich] sadly developed a condition called an essential tremor affecting his hands, soldering became much more difficult. But one day, while [Jonathan] was chatting with a friend, they were visited by the Good Ideas Fairy and in true hacker fashion, he ended up repurposing a handheld camera stabilizing gimbal to hold a soldering iron instead of a camera or smartphone. Now instead of the gimbal cancelling out hand movements to keep a camera steady, it instead helps keep a soldering iron steady.

While the inner workings of the cheap gimbal unit didn’t need modification, there were a couple of things that needed work before the project came together. The first was to set up a way to quickly and easily connect and disconnect the soldering iron from the gimbal. Thanks to a dovetail-like connector, the iron can be safely stored in its regular holster and only attached when needed.

The other modification is more subtle. The stabilizer motors expect to be managing something like a smartphone, but a soldering iron is both lighter and differently balanced. That meant that the system worked, but not as well as it needed to. After using some small lead weights to tweak the mass and center of gravity of the soldering iron — making it feel and move a bit more like an iPhone, as far as the gimbal was concerned — results were improved.

The soldering iron stabilizer works well enough for now, but we don’t doubt that [Jonathan] already has further tweaks in mind. This is a wonderful repurposing of a consumer device into an assistive aid, so watch it in action in the short video embedded below.

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An Exercise In Firmware Dumping With The GreatFET

Looking to hone his hardware hacking skills, [James Chambers] recently set out to reverse engineer a common cheap wireless keyboard: the Logitech K360. The chipset it uses has already been fairly well explored (and exploited) by security researchers, but the goal here was more about gaining some practical hands-on experience than it was breaking any new ground.

The first post in what we’re sure will be a fascinating series deals with dumping the board’s firmware using the GreatFET. We actually haven’t seen too many projects that showcase the capabilities of this highly capable open hardware multi-tool, so the post serves as a nice demonstration of how one goes about writing the necessary Python scripts to put it to work in a practical scenario.

Some promising bytes.

Of course, even with the best of tools, there’s always a few stumbling blocks. After identifying what was clearly some kind of programming header on the K360’s diminutive PCB, it took a few failed attempts at reading the firmware before [James] realized he needed to tap into more pins on the keyboard’s nRF24LE1 microcontroller. Once everything was physically wired up, he wrote some code for the GreatFET that would perform the proper incantations on the chip’s PROG and RESET pins to enable its programming interface.

[James] goes on to explain how you can pull some extended chip information out of the hardware and verify the contents of the firmware dump with Gihdra, but any more advanced analysis will have to wait until the next post in the series. In the meantime, if you like reading about hardware hacking from this “over the shoulder” viewpoint, you should check out some of the fantastic work that [wrongbaud] has sent in over the last year or so.

Make Your Desoldering Easier By Minding Your Own Bismuth

Any video that starts with a phase diagram has instantly earned our attention. Admittedly, we have a pretty low bar for that kind of stuff, but eye candy aside, [Robin Debreuil]’s quick outline of his technique for desoldering with the help of bismuth is worth watching.

Aside from its use in those pink gloopy solutions one takes for an upset stomach, bismuth has a lot of commercial applications. For the purposes of desoldering, though, its tendency to lower the melting point of tin and tin alloys like solder is what makes it a valuable addition to the toolkit. [Robin] starts with a demonstration of just how far a little bismuth depresses the melting point of tin solder — to about 135°. That allows plenty of time to work, and freeing leads from pads becomes a snap. He demonstrates this with some large QFP chips, which practically jump off the board. He also demonstrates a neat technique for cleaning the bismuth-tin mix off the leads, using a length of desoldering braid clamped at an angle to the vertical with some helping-hands clips. The braid wicks the bismuth-tin mix away from the leads along one side of the chip, while gravity pulls it down the braid to pool safely on the bench. Pretty slick.

Lest leaded solder fans fret, [Robin] ensures us this works well for lead-tin solder too. You won’t have to worry about breaking the bank, either; bismuth is pretty cheap and easily sourced. And as a bonus, it’s pretty non-toxic, at least as far as heavy metals go. But alas — it apparently doesn’t machine very well.

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Handheld Multimeter Converted For Bench Top Use

A few years ago [Mechatrommer] got one of the low-cost Aneng Q1 multimeters and has converted it into a bench top meter. He first tried and failed to do an LCD modification and set it aside. It remained in a storage box until he needed another meter to repair his rubidium frequency standard. Finding that off-the-shelf bench multimeters were literally off-the-shelf — they were too deep for his bench — he decided to take matters into his own hands.

He dug out the dismantled an Aneng Q1 and undertook a more drastic modification than before, slicing the multimeter into three pieces and mounting each piece in a new enclosure. The power-draining back-lit display of the Q1, problematic in a battery-powered handheld meter, isn’t an issue in a bench top design. [Mechatrommer] replaced the battery pack with a mains powered supply. Next he reconnected all the signals which had been interrupted by the bandsaw, and now the meter lives again.

The resulting meter is pleasing enough (ignore the sideways input jacks) and looks like a typical piece of home-brew test gear. The enclosure has a lot of empty space, which he uses to stow test leads and sandwiches (we saw a similar storage compartment in [Dave Jones]’s recent teardown of a portable Fluke 37 multimeter). Kudos to [Mechatrommer] for coming up with this unusual conversion project.

We’ve written about the differences between these low-cost and more professional multimeters before if you want to learn more.

Thanks to [Adrian] for the tip.

A Chainsaw Gives This Winch Some Grunt

For a satisfying Youtube watching session there is noting like some quality machine shop work, and that’s exactly what [Made In Poland] supply with their conversion of a small 12V winch to power from a chainsaw. The finished product contains not much more than the gearbox and shaft components from the original, but the mesmerising sight of rusty steel stock being transformed into dimension-perfect components which come together to form an entirely new assembly is as always a draw.

The conversion starts with the removal and disassembly of the motor to reveal its shaft and the locking mechanism for the drum. The shaft is then turned down and a collar manufactured to couple it to the drive spline on a chainsaw. We’re pleased to see that the chainsaw isn’t modified in this build, instead the blade is simply unscrewed and the winch attached in a reversible process. Finally, the original drum is deemed too small for the application, so a new drum is fabricated. We see the result on a Polish farm, happily participating in some forestry work and even pulling their pickup truck when it became stuck.

This is by no means the first time we’ve featured [Mad in Poland] in these pages, not least with this electromagnetic circle cutting jig.

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Chainsaw Cuts More Than Timber

We often take electricity for granted, to the point of walking into a room during a power outage and still habitually flipping the light switch. On the other hand, there are plenty of places where electricity isn’t a given, either due to poor infrastructure or an otherwise remote location. To get common electric power tools to work in areas like these requires some ingenuity like that seen in this build which converts a chainsaw to a gas-driven grinder that can be used for cutting steel or concrete. (Video, embedded below.)

All of the parts needed for the conversion were built in the machine shop of [Workshop from scratch]. A non-cutting chain was fitted to it first to drive the cutting wheel rather than cut directly, so a new bar had to be fabricated. After that, the build shows the methods for attaching bearings and securing the entire assembly back to the gas-powered motor. Of course there is also a custom shield for the grinding wheel and also a protective housing for the chain to somewhat limit the danger of operating a device like this.

Even though some consideration was paid to safety in this build, we would like to reiterate that all the required safety gear should be worn. That being said, it’s not the first time we’ve seen a chainsaw modified to be more useful than its default timber-cutting configuration, like this build which turns a chainsaw into a metal cutting chop saw.

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