A few years ago, I decided to try my hand at using SMD components for building circuits. I bought a cheap heat gun and some tweezers and set to work harvesting whatever parts I could melt off old PC circuit boards. Pretty soon, I realized that I needed a place to store all the little bits I had been liberating, as storing them scattered like grit across my workbench wouldn’t do. Continue reading
Digital calipers are wonderful. Once I bought my first set, it was hard to resist the urge to go measure all the things.
They are useful until the battery dies. The engineer in me gasps in horror when it realizes that the calipers never completely turn off; in fact, it is only the display that turns off, leaving the LR44 battery draining happily, pushing electrons through the rest of the circuit, 24/7. To be fair, the more expensive models lack this always-on “feature”, but let’s be honest. When was the last time you bought a $100 pair of calipers when you could instead get virtually the same for $15, even when you knew the battery life was numbered in months instead of years?
Here’s how I catalog my stock of leaded resistors. Each value has a card, and each card has ten resistors. A plastic bag holds the excess stock of the more common values.
A few months ago, my brother gave me his old Nikon D40 digital SLR camera. Through the wear and tear of taking 70,000 pictures over six years, the shutter mechanics had worn down just enough that the shutter would jam after less than ten shots. After unsuccessfully trying to fix it, my brother had replaced the body with a newer model. I was now the lucky recipient of the old camera body, along with the kit lens that originally shipped with it.