Posts from the Tool Hacks Category at Hack a Day

Great intro to surface mount soldering

Posted Jan 8th 2008 10:31PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks, tool-hacks

[Scott] sent in his video how-to on surface mount soldering. The macro video quality is excellent, and the demo is great even if you're already into SMD work. Everything can be done with fine solder, a decent soldering station, tweezers, a 10x loupe and a good selection of flux. I've managed quite a bit of SMD work without external flux, but this sort of demo shows just how effective it is.

Frostbot: CNC cookie frosting

Posted Dec 30th 2007 8:29PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks, tool-hacks

[Brian Schmalz] sent in his Frostbot. It's a fun CNC bot project that he built to frost cookies for his latest holiday party. He (wussed out a bit) and started with a kit based CNC machine, but he made up for it by driving it with his own control hardware (that sparkfun happens to have for sale). His USB bit wacker interface certainly looks interesting - I might consider adding it in front of the stepper controllers on my cnc mill. Especially interesting is the HPGL interpreter software that converts graphics to stepper commands via the bit whacker interface.

Open an AXA bike lock with a blank key (Doh)

Posted Dec 7th 2007 10:05AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks, tool-hacks

[Barry] sent in his writeup and video about a serious vulnerability in the AXA bike lock. (One of the most popular locks in the Netherlands.) It turns out that quite a few of them can be opened with a blank key. [Barry] demo's the hack, and has some comments about the lame efforts of the manufacturer. If you enjoy interesting reading, check out his blog covering lock picking and physical security.

DIY coil winding machine

Posted Oct 13th 2007 10:27PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks, tool-hacks

This will probably be more useful to custom speaker builders, but coil winding has always been a bit tedious. [iwicom] put together a simple coil winder using a hand drill, a magnet, a reed switch that triggers a pedometer. Aside from the coil winder, I love the idea of using the pedometer as a cheap event counter.

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