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Tinkerers



sn00p

ClioSport Club Member
  A blue one.
Just something I found while looking for a solution.

I have a lot of both mechanical parts (screws, threaded inserts, nuts, bolts, standoffs, etc, you get the picture) and electronic components. Nuts and bolts are actually f**king expensive, ridiculously so, and the number of times I've bought a pack of something only to lose it a week later.

I've been looking for a decent storage rack to store not just things like IC'sn, but the aforementioned screws and other hardware. Storage cabinets are again normally stupidly priced and generally pretty bloody ugly. You can get metal ones, but they start to look pretty shabby quite quickly.

Having just had a couple of delivery of screws in plastic cases, where the different sizes are in compartments with a flimsy removable barrier that if someday drops the parcel, will fall over and then everything gets mixed up, after an hour of sorting them out I decided to look again to find something better.

There is obviously a Chinese manufacturer who is flooding the market with a range of plastic component storage boxes, I personally think they look pretty good and they're made of plastic, you can pick them up on eBay pretty cheaply, 18 quid for come configurations up to about 33 quid, if you hunt through the sellers you'll find them under all sorts of brand names, but they're all the same containers. I picked up a 60 drawer version for 22 quid, and Homebase currently have a 39 drawer version (with 2 different sizes of compartments) which is 15 quid in store.



Just thought it might be of interest to a few folks.
 
  Clio 2.0 138hp
Just something I found while looking for a solution.

I have a lot of both mechanical parts (screws, threaded inserts, nuts, bolts, standoffs, etc, you get the picture) and electronic components. Nuts and bolts are actually f**king expensive, ridiculously so, and the number of times I've bought a pack of something only to lose it a week later.

I've been looking for a decent storage rack to store not just things like IC'sn, but the aforementioned screws and other hardware. Storage cabinets are again normally stupidly priced and generally pretty bloody ugly. You can get metal ones, but they start to look pretty shabby quite quickly.

Having just had a couple of delivery of screws in plastic cases, where the different sizes are in compartments with a flimsy removable barrier that if someday drops the parcel, will fall over and then everything gets mixed up, after an hour of sorting them out I decided to look again to find something better.

There is obviously a Chinese manufacturer who is flooding the market with a range of plastic component storage boxes, I personally think they look pretty good and they're made of plastic, you can pick them up on eBay pretty cheaply, 18 quid for come configurations up to about 33 quid, if you hunt through the sellers you'll find them under all sorts of brand names, but they're all the same containers. I picked up a 60 drawer version for 22 quid, and Homebase currently have a 39 drawer version (with 2 different sizes of compartments) which is 15 quid in store.



Just thought it might be of interest to a few folks.
Ive got one the same style as the top link and its been a life saver. I use it for all my electronics parts at my desk. Crimps, resistors, leds, etc..
I also have a few magnetic tool rails that i really recommend for people working with electronics. Keeps tools within reach without being spread across the desk. Will easily hold screwdrivers, strippers, crimpers, cutters etc ..

Should start a thread full of useful storage solutions. One of my pet hates is rubbish storage solutions.
 

Darren S

ClioSport Club Member
It's a good shout this.

I've got jiffy bags, plastic bags and even sections of toolboxes with various bolts, nuts and washers in them.

When the time comes to find the b******s that you only bought recently, you end up buying yet more as you can't recall where you placed the original lot!
 

Andy_con

ClioSport Club Member
  clio 182
bFrncl.jpg
 

Clio_fool

ClioSport Club Member
You can't beat an organised workbench. I'm a fucker for everything in its place but nuts and bolts and screws at home are stashed in all sorts of boxes and finding the one that fits takes ages. I think I need a trip to homebase and an afternoon sorting my s**t out!
 

sn00p

ClioSport Club Member
  A blue one.
I'd kill for space, but we live in a typicalLondon 100-year-old terrace, so there's no space whatsoever.

The house originally didn't have an indoor toilet/bathroom, it would have been in an outbuilding. Obviously, the house has been modified, but that caused its own set of problems, mainly that our already small kitchen actually has 3 f**king doors in it, one to the lounge, one to the back garden, and one to the bathroom (bath + sink) that was originally the coal shed.

Upstairs, is a toilet, but that would have originally been part of the second bedroom.

The wife goes batshit if I buy anything big! We have a proper shed (power, concrete walls, a proper roof that would be ideal for me and my s**t (stick a heater down there), but it's full of horse s**t, so I can't use that.

I have to pick and choose what equipment I can keep out, but my 3 essentials are a PSU, my oscilloscope, and a function generator.

I need to actually move all my screws and hardware (and electronics) into the storage systems I linked to, but I'm currently procrastinating on how to actually display the contents of each tray, I found a devent PDF the other day which has some images I can attach, as I have a variety of different screw types/styles/head types depending on their use, so I can't just put M3x10 and be done with it, some have cap heads, some are low profile, hex and so on.

1624861491164.png
 

sn00p

ClioSport Club Member
  A blue one.
My current side project, using the Ikea Samla 12L boxes to store my filament in, and I've looked at various hygrometers on amazon and basically without know what's inside them, it's hard to gain confidence in the readings you get from them, I keep reading things like 4 out of the 5 I bought all read completely wrong.

So I've knocked up this prototype, it's powered from a Li-Poly battery and uses a ESP32 to run the actual code, currently it's set to wake up every 5 minutes (way overkill, but it's useful for my testing purposes) and it takes a reading of the humidy, it publishes the reading to an MQTT broker and updates the screen to show the latest information.

The screen itself is a tri-colour e-paper module, here you can see that humidity reading is displayed with a red background to give a quick visual cue that the humidity in the box is currently above the threshold set, when the reading is below the threshold the background is black.

The battery indicator has points at 100%, 75%, 50% and 25%. At 25% the battery indicator also changes to a red background.

The date and time of the last measurement is displayed on the screen, this allows you to look at the unit and see whether it has died, because I'm using an e-paper display the content displayed is retained even when it's powered off (which is exactly the behaviour you need, this thing is battery powered and we can keep an LCD powered up because the battery won't last long at all).

Currently, it's a bit of a chunk as I used an off the shelf ESP32 board, which initially gave me problems because the USB bridge chip on it is unsupported on the latest macOS and I, therefore, couldn't upload code to it via the serial port, so I had to break out JTAG to I have a means of uploading code to it, the serial port and the humidity sensor are using JST headers as well, for the sensor this was so I could switch sensors while performing tests, I've added support in the code for a number of different sensors from across different manufacturers.

I spend most of the evening yesterday trying to find some specific components I need for the PCB I'm about to knock up, in case you haven't heard there's a massive silicon shortage and it's affecting everything, parts that were easy to get hold of a few months back are now impossible to get, some with lead times of 2 years! I've managed to grab enough to keep myself supplied with these units.

I'm looking to make this board tiny, maybe the same size as the e-paper module and much thinner, although I do have to consider the lipo battery as the sizes vary a lot with them.

1627819030691.png
 


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