Tools

Mini Electric Screwdriver

Many electronics devices have many screws in then. So opening them and closing (for repair or tear-down purposes) with normal screwdriver can feels sometimes as work. For bigger devices I use a small RYOBI cordless screwdriver with adjustable torque setting. It is suitable for medium size screws found in many electrical devices. But for those

Performing A Chip Transplant

Hackaday posting article Performing A Chip Transplant To Resurrect A Dead Board describes a situation where  the only option was to try to fix a device, which in the end involved a delicate chip transplant. The board was the Pixl.js, an LCD board with the nRF52832 SoC with its ARM Cortex M4, RAM, flash, and Bluetooth

Potato chip to TDR circuit

A time-domain reflectometer (TDR) is an electronic instrument that uses time-domain reflectometry to characterize and locate faults in metallic cables. I designed a TDR circuit many years ago for easy cable testing with oscilloscope: That circuit was also turned to an electronics kit that is sold by Far Circuits. When getting the original 74AC14 seemed

Oscilloscope with Arduino tutorials

Oscilloscope and Arduino are tools for modern makers. Here are some videos and articles that combine together Arduino and oscilloscopes: Learn Oscilloscope Basics with an Arduino Uno | AddOhms #28 Using an Oscilloscope and an Arduino Improve your Arduino programming skills – The budget oscilloscope. For more details, read the following articles: Learn Six Oscilloscope

Make simple fixtures from SMA connectors | EDN

https://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/si-pi-masterclass/4461028/Make-simple-fixtures-from-SMA-connectors For testing SMD components you need some test fixture. A fixed-geometry fixture produces consistent and repeatable results. This article tells how you can easily make fixed-geometry fixtures out of PCB-mounted SMA connectors. You can build a fixture to measure bypass capacitors using SMA-female edge-mount connectors. The narrow-base connectors (5 mm grid) and are best

Hakko 191 soldering iron meter

I got this “Hakko 191″ soldering iron temperature meter from Banggood some years ago. It is not available there but you could find similar devices from eBay etc.. According to Hakko official pages the model 191 TIP THERMOMETER has been discontinued maybe years ago. This is most probably some Chinese clone of the device because

SMD soldering videos

SMD stands for Surface Mount Device and they are components that you solder on the surface of a circuit board.Soldering them is somewhat different from soldering “traditional” through hole mounted components. There are many SMD soldering tutorials, for example How To Do SMD Soldering Using a Soldering Iron and Sparkfun Surface Mount Soldering Tutorials. Youtube