I wanted something smaller than most of the designs I had seen. These are 60mm x 60mm which makes them small enough to go into the Plano parts boxes I use for storage. I also wanted them in various widths with various slot openings. I use resistors and capacitors on paper tape but I also have chips and LEDs on plastic tape which require a wider body and slot. The splitter and slot width was important because I need to be able to clip off the end of the tape and throw them in a drawer without losing parts. I wanted to avoid multi part designs with clips and springs to connect to a rail or spools to hold the tape which make the whole thing wider. The cover was important because I expect to use them individually rather than connected together. Connecting them together with the LEGO pins was a concession to the guys I work with (well, one of the guys) who tends to build a few at a time where I tend to do a lot of prototyping and repairs. The pins mean there are no clips or pins projecting from the individual cartridges.

Yes, I’ve been a LEGO builder for 50 years or so and there is lots of Technics in my office. The LEGO pins are POM and very compliant. I’ve actually considered adding a DIN mount to these using a compliant DIN latch from BUD that I can buy from Digikey or Mouser. Another thing I’ve considered is just building DIN end clips where you have one with an integrated cover and one without. You would clamp those to a DIN rail then sandwich your stack up of cartridges between them. I’m just kicking around ideas right now.

I may ultimately make up a version with a window in the little sloped part so my friend can use a pick and place pen to pick the parts up from there with a bunch of them pinned together for assembly work. I tend to just expose the one or two parts I need and dump them out into the board I’m working on. I’m an electronic slob. I do most of my work under an Olympus SZ40 binocular microscope setup for soldering.

So, nothing major and I could have used any one of the designs available for download but I wanted to tinker with the design and print a bunch of similar but different cartridges that work for me.

Sorry…flow of consciousness.

Tweezers are the bomb. I’ve been doing a lot of repairs to old gaming consoles and hand helds. That actually paid for the new soldering station. Removing the surface mount caps without tweezers is possible but not easy.

I know OpenPnP. We have talked about it but most of the work I do is very small run. I hand solder everything down to 0402s and TQFPs with 0.4 mm pitch in one to three or four units. I’ve considered buying a hand PnP unit and I may at some point. I just upgraded to a new Hakko dual head soldering station which makes hand soldering stupid easy. I’ve probably got a few years of hand soldering in me.

Most of what I do is repairs and rework with a fair amount of prototyping.

For any production runs the guys I work with have PCBWAY do the populating for them.

Thanks. It’s loosely based on a number of designs that I’ve seen online. I wanted to make improvements to meet my needs.

“Lab” is a misnomer. I was running a lab for an adjacent product but the real grunt of this box was used for real time breach detection and hacker hunting where the box needed to be plugged directly into the network it was analyzing. I was very VERY good at detecting breaches. I met a group of the operators of APT1 and they knew who I was. Heh.

The UPS box was very heavy. The network and storage boxes were lighter. Most of the weight of this one is in the 20 hard drives and the DL360 chassis. This is definitely a 2 man lift.

I use my tractor at home and have the venue load it with a forklift when I’m on the rise.

I paid USD$160 for it used on Ebay.