Category: HerpDerp

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

  • July 2, 2021
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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 […]

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

  • June 11, 2021
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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
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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
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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
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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: […]

Wheels for the wheel-less QUICK 6601

  • April 28, 2021
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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.

Trying to heat-test some Nitto and Chukoh PTFE adhesive tapes

  • April 7, 2021
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Contrivances HerpDerp Mucking About With Things TØØLS
The “before” view of my second experimental setup. Three types of PTFE tape, two PTFE-impregnated glass fiber tapes and one straight PTFE tape, all with silicone adhesive, under test. How do you hold components in place while soldering? Not the PCBs on which the components are mounted. PCB holders and PCB vises can be pricey […]

Quick 6601 solder fume extractor and purifier

  • April 3, 2021
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Top of my Quick 6601 solder fume extractor and purifier, with the tethered remote control and not-yet consulted Chinese-language instruction manual resting next to the base of the flexible duct. There wasn’t much assembly involved. One end of the flexible duct slides onto the flange mounted atop the machine and attaching the flared rubber intake […]

Avoid swallowed by children

  • March 29, 2021
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Caution: Avoid swallowed by children. Rinse immediately with water if contact with eyes. We’ve been checking out the labels on the cleaning products, soaps, shampoos, deodorants, etc. that we use, looking for quats or substances that release them. Here’s an article that’ll give you an idea of why: Questioning quats’ safety, published in Chemical & […]

And we’re back.

  • March 29, 2021
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter

Canon laser printer teardown pareidolia

  • August 14, 2019
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HerpDerp Teardowns The Diary of Lupin Pooter
To satisfy my own curiosity, I recently tore down two old Canon multifunction printers, an inkjet and a laser. When I removed one of the motors, the relative positions of the hole into which the gear on the motor axle had gone and two rivets (which were actually the ends of metal axles for other […]

ALVVAYS in Hong Kong (at This Town Needs in Yau Tong)

  • July 24, 2019
Categories
HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter
I bought the tickets months ago and promptly forgot about it until I flipped to this week’s page in my tried-and-true dead-tree calendar/planner. Thus it transpired that S. and I went to see ALVVAYS play at This Town Needs (the reincarnation of Hidden Agenda) out in Yau Tong (a gritty-by-HongKong-standards industrial area sort of but […]