Category: Personal Firsts

My first taken-through-microscope soldering video

  • April 4, 2021
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Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts To see a world in a grain of sand TØØLS
Animated GIF clip of me soldering one pin on a breakout board. This afternoon, I soldered some breakout boards and recorded the process using the camera on my recently-acquired microscope (a SHOCREX 3800W) and used my other recent purchase (a QUICK 6601 solder fume extractor and purifier) to deal with the flux smoke instead of […]

Another chakra unblocked: first use of J-B Weld

  • January 29, 2019
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Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
A new bit of hardware needs to be bolted down to the benchtop during use but I’d like to be able to stow it away the rest of the time. The base of the item in question features four M8-diameter holes, so I hunted around for stainless steel threaded inserts. I could only find stainless […]

And just a few decades later…

  • October 5, 2018
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Two lemon batteries, connected in series, can (just barely) power a red LED. Making a lemon battery was one of the sciencey activities I encountered frequently while leafing through children’s science-experiments-you-can-do-at-home and “rainy day” activity books when I was a young’un and wanted to try but couldn’t. As this article explains, a single lemon isn’t […]

Looks like a worthwhile use of GPUs to me!

  • March 21, 2018
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HerpDerp Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Count the ZOTAC GPU boxes. Don’t forget to smile and wave at the surveillance camera pointed at the open door. It and the street-facing windows are open to facilitate a cross-breeze for free, or at least cheap, cooling. I’m looking for workshop space. It’s Hong Kong and we’re dealing with Hong Kong real estate agents […]

Lead-free solder recommendation: Kester K100LD for shiny lead-free solder joins

  • March 6, 2018
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts
Can you tell the difference between the contrast between the joins made with a type of SAC305 solder (top) and the K100LD solder (bottom), both from Kester? It occurred to me recently that I had no idea how much solder remained on the spool I’d been using, of the SAC305 alloy (Indium Corporation’s CW-807, a […]

Double rainbow at dawn

  • June 10, 2017
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Is that the way it is? Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
How long did it take you to spot the rainbow? The rainbow faded from one second to the next and, even at the moment I took the above photo, S. had to point it out to me. The fainter second rainbow, above and to the left of the first, only became apparent when I opened […]

Purikura with props; Or, getting the hang of using a Canon SELPHY printer.

  • February 3, 2017
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Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
We recently ventured out and acquired a Canon SELPHY CP1200 printer and the specialized paper and paper cartridge necessary for printing pages of photo stickers, eight identical stickers to a page, similar to the photo stickers produced by Japanese photo-sticker (purikura) booths. No small amount of fiddling with camera settings and a few sticker sheets […]

My soldering skillz still leave much to be desired

  • February 2, 2017
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Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
A new (minor) personal first: connecting and driving a display, from Arduino. Thanks to Adafruit for the tutorial (Monochrome OLED Breakouts) and open-source libraries I’m using to drive this little 128×64 OLED display. Note: I am a repeat Adafruit customer but purchased these particular displays from a Taobao merchant for a fraction of the Adafruit […]

Kester flux pens are fluxing fantastic!

  • December 13, 2016
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Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Late last month, after needing to re-do a substandard bit of my own soldering work and finding it quite a challenge to get the solder to melt and flow, I did a of reading and concluded that I ought to try another solder alloy from a different manufacturer and that de-soldering might be a heck […]

So this is what pareidolia feels like. Huh. Neato.

  • October 26, 2016
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Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts Spitting Images
Clicking through some of the photos I took of some of the micro-terrains of a sunflower, I found one that featured something that very closely resembled a creepy staring eye: Instead of being disappointed that there wasn’t a tiny human face beneath the mass of immature sunflower florets looking upwards toward the lens of my […]

How come nobody knows? Introducing NighIsTheEnd.rb, a helper script for making signs

  • September 7, 2016
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Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
First I acquired (read: bought cheap) some packs of velcro-backed felt letters. Then I got some large-ish scraps of thick black felt. On a completely unrelated project, I tried using a hot-glue glue gun for the first time in my life. It clogged. Boo hoo. I still needed a glue gun, so I ordered some […]

First-ever soldering experience! Why did I wait so long?

  • June 2, 2016
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Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts