Mailbag!

[@HazeAnderson]

So far I prefer the matte clear coat over the glossy --- you don't get the shine but it doesn't scratch easily, I like that trade off.

[@GadgetReboot]

I wonder if I can take a previously glossy one and sand it down and possibly redo it in matte. there was one thing I did where it should not have been glossy

[@AJB2K3]

Rustolium now has a range of sprays that don't use flammable solvents but now uses Co2 as the propellent.

[@kyleallred984]

Have you considered making a society recovery computer. Basically a raspberry pi in a faraday cage, with a bunch of knowledge repositories on a sd card. Some people go far adding sdr, gpio breakouts, network switch and other things like solar and battery.

[@GadgetReboot]

sometimes I wonder if society should be put in a cage. But when I think about it I am behind in the raspberry pi collection I think I only have a 3B as my latest. As far as storing information and archiving, one of the things I need to do is start doing a proper back up, I’d like to get a NAS set up and some redundant back ups because I’ve been tossing coins and hoping for the best for too many years.

[@kyleallred984]

@@GadgetReboot I too ponder the about the cage. Mostly seeing the copper tape with the mention of a faraday cage is what brought this to mind.

[@GadgetReboot]

it may be good to make a faraday enclosure to store phones or any sort of key fob for a car to help prevent unwanted poking around over the airwaves as well.

[@kilosierraalpha]

Those ESP32-C3s are interesting! BTW, I always forget to ask you, what do you use for magnification when working with SMT? I really need something other than a magnifier lens on 3rd hand...

[@GadgetReboot]

When needing to magnify for soldering, especially SSOP small ICs, I use one of those generic USB style microscopes with the built in screen so it can work stand alone or the display can appear on computer, or images/video saved on SD card. It's similar to this one but not the exact same because I got mine years ago amzn.to/3xDwCJQ I think they're all basically the same. I haven't used it with hot air, don't know if there'd be enough space but would also risk melting plastic. There's enough room for a soldering iron since that's used on an angle.

[@kilosierraalpha]

@@GadgetReboot Thank you so much! I'll be looking for something similar. I really need something because smaller SMD components look like sand to me now. Heh

[@GadgetReboot]

yeah the microscope is also good for inspecting the soldering job and finding solder bridges from pins that are very close together that can’t be seen with a regular magnifying lens

[@kilosierraalpha]

@@GadgetReboot I've been told numerous times in the past that you can't really use these USB cams for soldering because of the latency. Any opinions on that?

[@GadgetReboot]

I would expect if there’s any latency issues it would only be when using a computer, I only tried it momentarily when I first got it and I can’t remember if I had noticed that but using it with the built-in display seems real time. if I did have computer latency it wasn’t really a problem because I had to move so slow anyway with being zoomed in so much that any small move I make is excessive so I have to go very slow and get things properly in position and then it doesn’t even matter because I know I just need to press the iron tip slightly beside wherever it currently is and it can lag a few milliseconds if it wants