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Further Progress and Next Steps

A project log for DIY AOI RGB Light

Want a color-angular approach to inspecting your solder joint fillet quality? This rainbow-dome is your solution for less than $20!

sina-roughaniSina Roughani 02/09/2021 at 19:580 Comments

I've printed the Nocticron dome and found the 5mm LED's fit perfectly with the exclusive slicing tolerance. Much less painful than forcing them in with a crescent wrench. Unfortunately, I forgot the minimum focus distance of the Nocticron is NOT 4 inches. I'll need to print an adapter for my Macro-Elmarit lens instead.

I'll share a few more pics here.

Here's a MEMS microphone from TDK which has a tough footprint. The wicking effect and possible solder-mask bridging to signal lines makes it poor compared to other footprints. That's why these needed to come off of one of my old boards. Destructively. At least their cans look nice.

Here's an upcoming project- a PCB motor. You'll hear more about this one later this week. I think the pattern is neato and perfectly exploits surface tension to form a rugged assembly. Unfortunately, it fried one of my three-phase motor drivers so I'll need to figure out what to do about that.

I got a jar of ball bearings and got these eye-hole like shots. Forbidden caviar, anybody?

And here's the jar after I took the dome off horizontally

There was a pound of bearings there. After I clean that up, I'll be designing a 1m diameter dome with laser-cut black acrylic to take portraits. Maybe I can take it to the TC pride parade this year for portraits!

I wanna help more people use this in their photography, so I'd be willing to set up a Tindie or eBay kit with the LED's you'd need for about $10-$20 and fully assembled for maybe $50 depending on the interest. The domes take a full day to print, so that's where most of the cost comes from. I want you to do it yourself though, so have fun with those files!

The low material variant printed successfully after fiddling with parameters, needing to jump to middle slicing tolerance. This variant has a 6 inch radius which allows you to stick your hands underneath and this to be suspended overhead. It uses 100 grams of filament but takes more than a day to print! I used extra fine features, but in the end it was kind of worth it because they fit with a medium amount of effort. Not as bad as the inclusive slicing tolerance, but not as smooth as the exclusive slicing tolerance.

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