Inspired by this Reddit post, I decided I’d have a go at making a soldering board with helping hands. The bill of materials is over £10, but I’ve bought more than I need, so probably under a fiver for the build: Crocodile clips, 10 for 83p Oil coolant pipes, 10 for £3.83 Silicone mat, £1.50 Epoxy, 90p Anti-skid pads, 125 for 90p Sandpaper, 25 sheets for 90p 3:1 sticky heatshrink, 5 metres for £1.

I just made a portable power supply out of a few components. I wanted something more flexible than my bench supply. So the parts list is: TP4056, which can charge a LiIon or LiPo battery at the same time as powering a circuit from it, or USB. In powerbank terms it would be called pass-through. It also provides over [dis]charge protection but I don’t think reverse polarity protection (could be solved with a diode).

Its been quite a while since my last post, so here’s a big one….. I’ve been doing a lot of 3D printing since I received my FlashForge Creator Pro 2016. I learned OpenSCAD and FreeCAD, my designs are here. I’ve made various enclosures for Arduino’s and Raspberry Pi’s, as well as USBASP cases, voltmeter cases, solder tip holders, calliper battery savers, resistor forming tools, soldering helping hands, bottle openers, trolley tokens, SD card holders, PIR cases, Dremel accessories, various 3D printer upgrades and the usual calibration prints.

I fancied figuring out if it was my cat or the neighbourhood cats pooping in my side alley (oh er missus!) so thought I’d find a use for my PiNoIR camera and that spare B+ I usually use RaspiMJPEG for webcam sorts of things like timelapse or somesuch, but it seems in a state of flux – the internal motion-detection system simply doesn’t work it would seem, and the external system is still using Motion and not the MMAL version, so its slow and can only cope with about VGA resolution on a B+, and it doesn’t seem to work in timelapse mode, and seems flaky at best anyway.

After looking at wireless print servers costing £35+ I decided to make my own using my spare Raspberry Pi Zero (original without camera connector). I needed a wifi dongle and USB connection for the printer, so have bought a Zero4U USB hub HAT and case, in fact I bought two of each as the shipping was fixed, so it came to £23 shipped from the Czech Rebuplic, so shouldn’t take too long to arrive.