• 3D Printed Case and Demo

    sjm4306 • 05/10/2022 at 17:37 • 0 comments

    I know it's been awhile since the last video I made on this project. Sometimes you start a project with so much energy and then just get bogged down with life and other projects till your enthusiasm just wanes. I spent quite a bit of time trying to design a really fancy 3D printed case for the VacPen that I could see the feature creep starting to loom so I decided to just go simple and functional so I could wrap this project up and use it. So this version is more a prototype than a finished commercial looking device. The case could use some screws, integrated pcb mounting to utilize the onboard touch sensing pad and most importantly a better battery enclosure method. But I just wanted something done now to help assemble pcbs that will arrive very soon so let's wrap this project up and leave improvements for version 2.0!

  • Proof of Concept and PCB/Software

    sjm4306 • 05/10/2022 at 17:37 • 0 comments

    It was only a matter of time before my soldering escapades led me to this point. Fed up with tweezing tinier and tinier parts onto tightly packed pcbs I seek a way to preserve my sanity. In this video we take a look a the starting point in the process of designing a vacuum pickup tool to help me wrangle those miniature mosfets, those tiny transistors, those little LEDs, those micro ... microcontrollers. I think you get the point anyway, alliteration aside, Let's see what components I plan to use, the pcb I designed to control everything and finally give it a test run. The core of this project started when I found some sort of gas leak detector for cheap at a thrift store. I popped it open to discover a tiny adorable pump, tubing, and the handpiece. I ended up reusing these parts to prototype a small vacuum pickup tool and they worked surprisingly well.