In August, I started working on what I thought would be a small, couple of hours project to make yet another diode matrix rework of the Ferris Sweep Half Swept for Seeed Xiao called Swoon. I hoped to make a flippable, hand-solderable version that could be produced as cheaply as possible, and a version that could be fully assembled by the board house.
Last fall, my 3d printing processes came unhinged. I was preparing to take on some explorations in clay, and I prudently decided to begin by ripping both of my printers completely apart. Through the years, my printers' chassis had become a hodgepodge of transformers, buck converters wrapped in heatshrink tube and level shifters: I needed to find clarity.
While looking up the conversation about using ADXL345 as a probe for the piezo article, I stumbled on jniebuhr/adxl345-probe from summer 2024.
I bought a TS80P a few years ago, and it has been my trusty soldering companion ever since. Despite my rough handling—using it for heat set inserts and even melting bearings into PLA—the iron has held up remarkably well. However, my main B02 tip had become so oxidized that only a tiny corner could be tinned. I feared I might need a new tip, but after soaking it in a halved lemon for several hours, scraping it periodically with the coarse side of my sponge, heating and wiping it with a brass brush, and repeating the lemon treatment, it was back to a fully tinnable state.