ATtiny LED Letter Keychain Kit

April 10, 2021 fustinisurface mount, tindie, wearablesLeave a comment

Jo Hinchliffe writes on the Tindie blog:

If you have tried your hand at soldering and want to progress to soldering with surface mount devices (SMD), this LED keychain kit might be just the ticket!
The kit is comprised of a tiny PCB featuring a grid of pads onto which you solder some of the 15 SMD LEDs supplied. You can use as many or as few as you need to make your chosen letter or icon. Arranged as 3 columns of 5 LED’s you can make any letter you require. The ATtiny micro controller can be supplied pre-flashed with the project code and once assembled the keychain has four display modes, all on, slow blink, fade and fast blink. Of course the code is provided in the documentation and you could always create your own patterns for the device.
You get a choice of LED colour when ordering and we think this is a great way to practice your SMD soldering or a nice kit to put together as a gift for someone.

Portable Ham Antenna Uses SMD Capacitors

November 19, 2020November 19, 2020 fustinihackaday, HAM, SMD, surface mount, wirelessLeave a comment

From Al Williams on Hackaday:

Portable Ham Antenna Uses SMD Capacitors

[K6ARK] likes to operate portable, so he puts together very lightweight antennas. One of his latest uses tiny toroids and SMD capacitors to form trap elements. You can see the construction of it in the video below.
You usually think of toroid winding as something you do when building transmitters or receivers, especially small ones like these. We presume the antenna is best for QRP (low power) operation since the tiny core would saturate pretty quickly at higher power. Exactly how much power you should pass through an FT50-43 core depends on the exact application, but we’ve seen numbers around 5 watts.

Unofficial Remoticon 2020 badge by Thomas Flummer in “After Dark”

October 16, 2020October 16, 2020 fustiniAfter Dark, badgelife, conference, hackaday, Remoticon, smd challenge, soldering, supercon, surface mountLeave a comment

Next up a bit of #badgelife for the @hackaday #Remoticon – featuring a variant of @TheMakersBox SMD challenge on the front, pin headers for an @adafruit Feather on the back and a lot of prototyping pads. I think this will look great in @oshpark AfterDark https://t.co/3vSYM01msr pic.twitter.com/MT85pEdTfS
— Thomas Flummer (@thomasflummer) October 5, 2020

The annual Hackaday Supercon is taking place as Remoticon this year and the talented Thomas Flummer has design a PCB badge based on the SMD challenge that can be further customized in KiCad!

The board can be ordered from the shared project page in “After Dark”:

NOTE: make sure to check “After Dark” in the cart

Challenge Your Soldering Skills With Snowy0201

October 20, 2018 fustiniSMD, soldering, surface mount, tindieLeave a comment

From Bradley Ramsey on the Tindie blog:

The Snowy Owl is the rebel of owls. They live in the north near arctic regions of the world, and unlike other owls, they are active during the day instead of the night. Owls in general are pretty great, which is why this Snowy Owl version of the Surface Mount Device 0201 soldering challenge kit caught my eye.

For this challenge, the resistors on the back of the owl have been changed to a 0201 packages for an additional level of difficulty. These are cellphone-level miniaturization so it will be a challenge. A dual inverter NL27WZ04 is used to implement the ring oscillator, which drives the blinking LEDs.

Think you’re up to the challenge?

Competitive Soldering is Now a Thing

September 3, 2018August 30, 2018 fustinidefcon, hackaday, makersbox, SMD, soldering, surface mount, tindieLeave a comment

At Hackaday, we’re constantly impressed by the skill and technique that goes into soldering up some homebrew creations. We’re not just talking about hand-soldering 80-pin QFNs without a stencil, either: there are people building charlieplexed LED arrays out of bare copper wire, and using Kynar wire for mechanical stability. There are some very, very talented people out there, and they all work in the medium of wire, heat, and flux.

At this year’s DEF CON, we opened the floodgates to competitive soldering. Along with [Bunny] from Hardware Hacking Village and the many volunteers from the HHV and Soldering Skills Village, dozens competed to solder up a tiny kit full of LEDs and microscopic resistors.

The kit in question was an SMD Challenge Kit put together my MakersBox, and consisted of a small PCB, an SOIC-8 ATtiny, and a LED and resistor for 1206, 0805, 0603, 0402, and 0201 sizes. The contest is done in rounds. Six challengers compete at a time, and everyone is given 35 minutes to complete the kit.

via Competitive Soldering is Now a Thing — Hackaday

A 3D-Printed Bowl Feeder for Tiny SMD Parts

August 2, 2018July 25, 2018 fustinihackaday, prototyping, SMD, SMT, surface mountLeave a comment

[Andrzej Laczewski] has something big in mind for small parts, specifically SMD resistors and capacitors. He’s not talking much about that project, but from the prototype 3D-printed bowl feeder he built as part of it, we can guess that it’s going to be a pretty cool automation project.

Bowl feeders are common devices in industrial automation, used to take a big pile of parts like nuts and bolts and present them to a process one at a time, often with some sort of orientation step so that all the parts are the right way around. They accomplish this with a vibratory action through two axes, which [Andrzej] accomplishes with the 3D-printed ABS link arms supporting the bowl.

via A 3D-Printed Bowl Feeder for Tiny SMD Parts — Hackaday

How You Can Build Complex Circuits

July 22, 2018July 19, 2018 fustinieducation, Robotics, solder paste, soldering, surface mountLeave a comment

How You (Yes YOU) Can Build Complex Circuits

Here at mimicEducationalRobots we farm out most of our production circuit board assembly, but we still assemble all prototypes in house. Most people are surprised to learn how relatively simple the process really is. This blog assumes that a unique PCB of your own design has come out of your wonderful brain, or at least that you’re interested in how we do things here.

Screenshot from 2018-07-18 19-34-24.png

Simple Mechanism Gives Support for SMT Assembly

April 12, 2018April 11, 2018 fustiniassembly, hackaday, hackaday.io, pnp, prototyping, Reflow, SMD, SMT, solder paste, soldering, surface mountLeave a comment

Dan Maloney on the Hackaday blog:

Simple Mechanism Gives Support for SMT Assembly

To fight the shakes, you can do one of two things: remove the human, or improve the human. Unable to justify a pick and place robot for the former, [Tom] opted to build a quick hand support for surface-mount work, and the results are impressive considering it’s built entirely of scrap.

It’s just a three-piece arm with standard butt hinges for joints; mounted so the hinge pins are perpendicular to the work surface and fitted with a horizontal hand rest, it constrains movement to a plane above the PCB. A hole in the hand rest for a small vacuum tip allows [Tom] to pick up a part and place it on the board — he reports that the tackiness of the solder paste is enough to remove the SMD from the tip.

Cyborg Ring

February 9, 2018February 9, 2018 fustinicordwood, hackaday.io, jewelry, neurobytes, neurotinker, SMT, surface mount, wearablesLeave a comment

From zakqwy on Hackaday.io:

Cyborg Ring

cordwood + smt + jewelry + blinkies + zinc-air batteries

This project evolved from Splinter, the SMT cordwood project I did last summer/fall. The ring is powered by tiny size 10 hearing aide batteries which should give 4-6 weeks of intermittent use, once I come up with a design that doesn’t break after a few days of wear and update the firmware to put the ATtinyx5 to sleep. The first rev (labelled ‘blink-ring’) used deep red 650nm LEDs. Searching for particular component lengths gave me an excuse to use strange 0508 resistors. And somehow, this is my first Charlieplexing project. Yaay novelty soldering!

Reflowduino: Open Source Reflow Oven Controller

November 8, 2017November 8, 2017 fustiniarduino, hackaday, hackaday prize, microcontroller, Reflow, SMD, SMT, soldering, surface mount1 Comment

Dan Maloney writes on Hackaday about Timothy Woo’s Reflowduino:

Hackaday Prize Entry: Reflowduino, the Open Source Reflow Oven Controller

Face it — you want a reflow oven. Even the steadiest hands and best eyes only yield “meh” results with a manual iron on SMD boards, and forget about being able to scale up to production. But what controller should you use when you build your oven, and what features should it support? Don’t worry…

Dubbed the Reflowduino for obvious reasons, Timothy Woo’s Hackaday Prize entry has everything you need in a reflow oven controller, and a few things you never knew you needed.

OSH Park

Perfect Purple PCBs

surface mount

ATtiny LED Letter Keychain Kit

Portable Ham Antenna Uses SMD Capacitors

Unofficial Remoticon 2020 badge by Thomas Flummer in “After Dark”

Challenge Your Soldering Skills With Snowy0201

Competitive Soldering is Now a Thing

A 3D-Printed Bowl Feeder for Tiny SMD Parts

How You Can Build Complex Circuits

Simple Mechanism Gives Support for SMT Assembly

Cyborg Ring

Cyborg Ring

Reflowduino: Open Source Reflow Oven Controller

Hackaday Prize Entry: Reflowduino, the Open Source Reflow Oven Controller