Busted: Toilet Paper As Solder Wick

June 14, 2024 by Dan Maloney 30 Comments

It didn’t take long for us to get an answer to the question nobody was asking: Can you use toilet paper as solder wick? And unsurprisingly, the answer is a resounding “No.”

Confused? If so, you probably missed our article a few days ago describing the repair of corroded card edge connectors with a bit of homebrew HASL. Granted, the process wasn’t exactly hot air solder leveling, at least not the way PCB fabs do it to protect exposed copper traces. It was more of an en masse tinning process, for which [Adrian] used a fair amount of desoldering wick to pull excess solder off the pins.

During that restoration, [Adrian] mentioned hearing that common toilet paper could be used as a cheap substitute for desoldering wick. We were skeptical but passed along the tip hoping someone would comment on it. Enter [KDawg], who took up the challenge and gave it a whirl. The video below shows attempts to tin a few pins on a similar card-edge connector and remove the excess with toilet paper. The tests are done using 63:37 lead-tin solder, plus and minus flux, and using Great Value TP in more or less the same manner you’d use desoldering braid. The results are pretty much what you’d expect, with charred toilet paper and no appreciable solder removal. The closest it comes to working is when the TP sucks up the melted flux. Stay tuned for the bonus positive control footage at the end, though; watching that legit Chemtronics braid do its thing is oddly satisfying.

So, unless there’s some trick to it, [KDawg] seems to have busted this myth. If anyone else wants to give it a try, we’ll be happy to cover it.

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No TP? No Problem!

November 16, 2023 by Jenny List 42 Comments

Among First World Problems, there can be few worse than running out of toilet paper. The horror! If you’re not able to do as we did yesterday and borrow a pack until more can be bought, then you’re not without options. A handy copy of the Daily Mail could be cut into squares and hung up in your Smallest Room, or you can even make your own with the help of this handy instructional video from [whoisandrewfahmy]. It appears from a casual search to be one of many such guides that appeared during the pandemic when the bog roll supply was seen as endangered, but it’s still interesting simply as a diversion into how something is made.

The process is surprisingly straightforward, starting with scrap paper, which is shredded and soaked before being boiled to break down to pulp. The pulp is then emulsified, and some body oil is added to remove the sandpaper-on-the-butt experience before being spread between a sheet and a piece of window screen to be ironed dry. It’s an energy-intensive process, so the Daily Mail is likely to be an easier stopgap if no friends can lend you a few rolls, but it’s left us here curious about papermaking. The butts of Hackaday may be safe from homemade TP, but that’s not to say that it wouldn’t be interesting to make other paper products. Check out the video below.

Of course, back in April 2020 we had our own solution to the pandemic toilet paper shortage. After you make your bespoke dunny roll, how can you wind it into a nice roll? Don’t worry. We got you.

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Keep Track Of Toilet Paper Usage With This IoT Roll Holder

February 3, 2022 by Dan Maloney 51 Comments

Remember the Great Toilet Paper Crisis of 2020? We sure do, and it looks like our old friend [Vije Miller] does as well, while seemingly harboring a somewhat morbid fascination about how much paper every bathroom visitor is consuming. And to that end, we present his IoT toilet sheet tracker.

His 3D printed roll holder has a Hall effect sensor that counts revolutions of the roll and sends it to a NodeMCU. The number of sheets per roll is entered when the roll is changed, so some simple math yields the number of sheets each yank consumes. Or at least a decent estimate — [Vije] admits that there’s some rounding necessary. The best part of the build is the connection to Thingspeak, where sheet usage is plotted and displayed. Go ahead and check it out if you dare; at the time of writing, there was an alarming spike in sheet usage — a sudden need for 68 sheets where the baseline usage is in single digits. We shudder to think what might have precipitated that. The video below is — well, let’s just say there’s a video.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen bathroom-based projects from [Vije Miller]. A few years back there was an attempt to freshen the air with plasma, and his IoT shower valve controller probably never scalded anyone accidentally.

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Toilet Paper Warmer Is A Unique Chinese Luxury

January 14, 2022 by Lewin Day 32 Comments

[Handy Geng] lives in Baoding, China, where average winter temperatures can get as low as −7.7 °C (18.1 °F). Rather than simply freezing in the cold when using the bathroom, he decided he could do better. Thus came about his rather unique toilet paper heating system.

The build uses a gas burner heating up a wok. Toilet paper is fed into the wok body via motorized rollers salvaged from what appears to be an old counterfeit money detector. The wok is then shaken by a second motor in order to more evenly heat the toilet paper within. The burner can then be turned off, and the lid of the wok opened in order to gain access to the toasty toilet paper.

The system heats the toilet paper to a scorching 75 °C (167 °F); a little too warm to comfortably touch, but thankfully toilet paper doesn’t have a lot of thermal mass so cools off relatively quickly. It’s also thankfully well below the auto-ignition temperature of paper of 451 °F.

It’s a noisy, clanging machine that nonetheless provides the same warmth and comfort that you’re probably more familiar with from the office photocopier. It’s not [Handy Geng]’s first bathroom hack, either. Video after the break.

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Smart Toilet Paper Holder Keeps Track Of White Gold

June 26, 2020 by Lewin Day 24 Comments

As we all woke up in 2020 on New Year’s Day, few of us would have predicted how terrible everything would get in just a few short months. Worldwide shortages of toilet paper were just the tip of the iceberg, making everyone more keenly aware of their stocks at home. This was something [thepenguinmaster] decided to take a stab at managing in the cloud. Enter the Smart Toilet Paper Roll.

The device consists of a 3D printed toilet roll holder, outfitted with sensors to track usage of the precious material. A magnetic rotary encoder is used to monitor rotation of the roll, with a LIDAR device used to sense when a user’s hand is in close proximity. Data is trucked to the cloud by an Avnet Azure Sphere MT3620. The link with Azure allows for the automatic generation of graphs and access from anywhere over the Internet.

The project goes to show that just about anything around the house can be monitored over the Internet. We’d love to see the tracker go even further, measuring usage on a per-sheet basis and automatically ordering more when supplies get low. We’ve seen similar work before, too.

Toilet Paper Chase And Indoor Cycling Race With Unity And Arduino

May 29, 2020 by Sven Gregori 4 Comments

While we’re still far away from returning to a pre-Corona everyday life, people seem to have accepted that toilet paper will neither magically cease to exist, nor become our new global currency. But back at the height of its madness, like most of us, [Jelle Vermandere] found himself in front of empty shelves, and the solution seemed obvious to him: creating a lifelike toilet paper chasing game in hopes to distract the competition.

Using Unity, [Jelle] created a game world of an empty supermarket, with the goal to chase after distribution tubes and collect toilet paper packs into a virtual cart. Inspired by the Wii Wheel, he imitated a shopping cart handle built from — as it appears — a sunshade pole that holds an Arduino and accelerometer in a 3D-printed case as game controller. For an even more realistic feel, he added a sound sensor to the controller, and competing carts to the game, which can be pushed out of the way by simply yelling loud enough. You can witness all of this delightful absurdity in his build video after the break.

From racing shopping carts to racing bicycles

But that’s not all. With the toilet paper situation sorted out, [Jelle] found himself in a different dilemma: a cloud foiled his plans of going for a bicycle ride. In the same manner, he ended up building a cycling racing game, once again with Unity and Arduino. From a 3D-scanned model of himself and his bicycle, to automatically generating tracks on the fly and teaching an AI to ride a bike, [Jelle] clearly doesn’t joke around while he’s joking around.

However, the best part about the game has to be the controller, which is his actual bicycle. Using a magnetic door sensor to detect the speed, and a potentiometer mounted with an obscure Lego construction to the handlebar, it’s at least on par with the shopping cart handle — but judge for yourself in another build video, also attached after the break. The only thing missing now is to level up the difficulty by powering the Arduino with the bicycle itself.

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Roll Your Own – Toilet Paper

May 9, 2020 by Jenny List 17 Comments

Toilet paper has become a hot button issue over the last month or so, and the pandemic prompted panic buying, and consequent shortages. Now there are adequate supplies, at least where this is being written, but sometimes one’s rolls aren’t the domestic items we’re all used to. This happened to [Ebenezer], who had some of the large size rolls suitable for toilet roll dispensers rather than a domestic bathroom. To solve this problem he made a makeshift toilet roll winder.

The adventures of small dogs aside, we all know that toilet rolls unroll themselves very easily indeed but are a significant pain to get back on the roll once they have done so. Rolling toilet paper must therefore be an exact science of velocity and tension, which he approached with a 3D printed shaft that mounts a toilet roll tube in a Ryobi drill. Getting the tension right was a bit tricky, but we’re extremely impressed with the result. Like him we’d have expected some side-to-side movement, but there was very little and a near perfect toilet roll was the result.

This is a simple hack, but one extremely well executed, and that it does something we might normally consider near-impossible is a bonus. Of course, should you wish to ration your toilet paper, you can always print it.