And you’ll no doubt remember ’s Zelda-esque potassium ferrioxalate crystals, or even when he turned common table salt into perfect crystal cubes. Is there any use for these crystals? Probably not, other than their beauty and the whole coolness factor of watching nature buck its own “no straight lines” rule. also shares tips for growing crystal clusters, which have a beauty of their own, as do dehydrated copper acetate crystals, with their milky bluish appearance. Suspend a seed crystal in the saturated solution, and patience will eventually reward you with a huge, shiny blue-black crystal. The solution is concentrated by evaporation until copper acetate crystals start to form. The process begins with making a saturated solution of copper acetate by dissolving the scrap copper bits in the vinegar and peroxide for a couple of days. The recipe for these lovely giant crystals that shares is almost too simple - just scrap copper, vinegar, and a bit of hydrogen peroxide - and just the over-the-counter strength versions of those last two. That said, there’s no denying that crystals do hold sway over us with the almost magical power of their beauty, as with these home-grown copper acetate crystals. Posted in Crowd Funding, Tool Hacks Tagged 7 segment, Crowd Funding, Crowd Supply, inventory, kit production, smt reel, SMT tape, toolsĬrystals, at least those hawked by new-age practitioners for their healing or restorative powers, will probably get a well-deserved eye roll from most of the folks around here. Want the nitty-gritty details? Visit the GitHub repository for the project and see it all for yourself at the CAD level. After all, has a lot of experience in getting clever with board fabrication, and eagle-eyed readers may even suspect that the reset and setup buttons on the edge of the tool are created by using flex PCB segments as switches. If you looked at the photos and suspected that the big, 7-segment numeric display is done with clever PCB fabrication options (making segments by shining LEDs through PCB layers, a trick we always like to see) you’re not alone.
In fact, the hassle of cutting tape segments accurately and repeatedly is a common pain point, so making the job easier has value.
Sure, one can measure SMT tape with a ruler or a reference mark to yield a segment containing a fixed number of parts, but that involves a lot of handling and doesn’t scale up very well. In fact, the usefulness of this tool for creating tape segments of fixed length is perhaps not obvious to anyone who hasn’t done it by hand. The first is handy for obvious reasons, and the second is useful for things like creating kits. Why would one want to make such a task easier? Two compelling reasons for such a tool include: taking inventory of parts on partial reels or cut tape, and creating segments that contain a known number of parts. The device is powered by a CR2032 cell and and works with 8 mm wide tapes up to 2 mm in height, which says covers most 0805 or smaller sized parts, as well as things like SOT-23 transistors. That device is the BeanCounter, an upcoming small handheld unit of his own design that counts parts as quickly as one can pull tape through a slot. Has an interesting idea for a new tool, one that has the simple goal of making accurate part counts of SMT reels as easy as pulling tape through a device.