Don’t you wanna watch me spill? Alerting when a container is nearly full of liquid.

  • August 19, 2021
Categories
Arduino C++ Contrivances The Diary of Lupin Pooter
This first video shows the water-level sensing setup with the container its monitoring still nearly empty, pulsing its LED in blue to that it’s powered-up. Slow-pulsing the RGB LED in blue. This second video shows the water-level sensing setup transitioning from getting-full (orange blinking LED) to nearly-fill (blinking red and emitting an irritating noise). Faster-pulsing […]

Won’t fly far, fethers [sic] snipped

  • August 8, 2021
Categories
HerpDerp Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Spotted this lost-pet poster for a parrot near a bus shelter early last month and, just now, stumbled across the photo I snapped of it at the time. Hope they found the bird!

Dusty, grimy, sometimes packed in trash, and occasionally short

  • July 2, 2021
Categories
HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
A pair of NOS gloves that I donned to protect my hands while snipping off lengths of 304 stainless steel mesh. Handling a couple of small rolls of clean-looking SS for a few minutes left them visibly filthy. Buying stuff from merchants in China directly, rather than from a retailer whose stock comes from a […]

Soldering fixture test: stainless steel mesh + silicone foam

  • June 21, 2021
Categories
Contrivances Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Here’s the setup I tried: a cut-off length of white silicone foam (with a 15mm x 20mm rectangular cross-section), a roughly square piece of stainless steel mesh, and binder clips securing the mesh against the foam. On occasion, one needs or wants to solder wires to a small and irregularly-shaped component. Last month, I tried […]

This may not have worked (reliably) even if I’d had the pin ordering correct

  • June 11, 2021
Categories
Contrivances HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Here’s a zoomed-in image of my attempt to connect to an SCD41 sensor without soldering wires onto it or cobbling together some sort of jig with pogo pins. I recently got some SCD41 sensors. They report CO2 level in PPM as well as temperature and humidity. They’re also surface-mount, of the LGA variety and small […]

Calibration slides: a boon for measuring small things like the dimensions of solder pads on surface mount components

  • May 28, 2021
Categories
Contrivances HerpDerp Mucking About With Things TØØLS
One of the calibration slides, with the 1-mm-per-division scale above a new surface-mount CO2 sensor from Sensirion. I hadn’t aligned the start of the scale with the left side of the sensor yet, but it’s 1 centimeter (10mm) square. The trend seems to be that the share of interesting new thingamajigs and doodads available only […]

Hits and a miss, sort-of fixing obliterated solder pads on a PCB

  • May 25, 2021
Categories
HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Pre-solder-enblobbening photo of my jury-rigged fix for an obliterated solder pad intended for the positive pin of a coin-cell battery holder mounted on the reverse of the PCB. In recent months, I’ve been lending a helping hand to a few people who’ve shown interest in electronics. I’m not an EE or an electronics expert of […]

Success: eliminated as non-optimal one way of soldering wires onto tiny, irregularly-shaped components

  • May 20, 2021
Categories
HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Testing TØØLS
Behold, my home workbench. The component I hoped to solder is bathed in the illumination from my microscope’s LED ring light. Tonight, I tried one very simple way of holding an itty bitty, non-flat electronics component and some wires still while I solder the stripped ends of the wires to the pads on the component: […]

The undeserving maintain power by promoting hysteria

  • May 5, 2021
Categories
Is that the way it is? The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Before heading to a “community testing center” for government-blessed RT-PCR tests, we each did a home-based pinprick blood antibody test. I’ll restrain myself, insofar as possible, from commenting here on Hong Kong politics beyond observing that the territory continues to pursue, as best one can tell, a “zero-COVID” policy. Please know that the title of […]

Wheels for the wheel-less QUICK 6601

  • April 28, 2021
Categories
HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
The wheeled cart I purchased to make moving my Quick 6601 solder fume extractor and purifier around. Inside the box, newspaper recycled as environmentally-friendly packing material. The wheels were an optional add-on, replacing the default rickety all-plastic casters.

Storage shelf mitosis

  • April 28, 2021
Categories
Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Measuring the shelf upright, trying to figure out the best location for my hacksaw cut. Storage, storage, storage. Utterly tedious, once you’ve made your plan and purchased the storage hardware, and yet at the same time so necessary. Recently, I erected some shelving in our storage room (which was actually intended as the bedroom for […]

An alley in Causeway Bay

  • April 13, 2021
Categories
Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Photos of and through an alley gate in Causeway Bay (April 2021).