We're heading to an educator conference at the end of the month, hoping to teach some STEM teachers to solder at our booth.

After being inspired by what other's have done with @oshpark.bsky.social's after dark, I threw together the design for a sick new soldering badge with twinkling LED stars.

When learning something, one of the most important resources is a person who will tell you "no, you are wrong, you are not making sense, what you are saying is meaningless," to keep you from going further and further wrong without knowing it.

Chatgpt tells you what you want to hear.

Now that we've been shipping the deluxe version of our soldering kit for a while, I wanted to share some of the messy, joyful practicality involved in bringing a product (even a simple one like this) to life.

learntosolderkits.com/blogs/news/d...

When we buy raw materials that go into a finished product, we're not required to pay sales tax since the product will get taxed when it our customer buys it.

Can someone ELI5 why nobody has talked about doing this with tariffs? You can't actually make stuff in the US if you can't afford parts.

Everyone in the past was neurotypical, which is how we got things like this single-author, eight-volume encyclopedia of ferns

My first ever flex board has arrived from @oshpark.bsky.social! Not sure I've ever been this excited for the inevitable discovery that I've made a series of mistakes.

Thanks! It was my first time doing a bulk upload to Digikey of my BOM and the parts actually came really well labeled - even including my reference designators (R4, C12, etc). It was a pretty slick process.

The real challenge now is making sure to only open one bag at a time and not lose anything 😜

Component day for a new prototype PCB!

It's pretty overwhelming to try and keep track of 40 or so bags of such teeny tiny things. How the hell do EEs manage?

Black Mirror pitch: POTUS destroys democracy in 90 days.

Everyone watches it happen on their phones.

The opposition party leaders are 85 years old and post "Hey, stop" once a day.

Toiletries are locked behind glass.

An evil online bookstore sends Katy Perry into space for feminism.

[fin]

Every day The Onion's headlines feel more and more believable

Anyone else have packages in flight and are not sure what's actually gonna happen when they show up?

We ordered some components on 3/17 - $583 - under the de minimus so we were assuming no tariffs

They've gone in and out of customs in this craziness. Do we pay UPS $729 to liberate $583 in parts?

I did a quick quote the other day from a localish supplier to see where they were at.

For the same specs, it came to $3.40/board @2000pcs with a 4-week lead time and about $6/ea to hit the current lead time from PCBWay of 8-10 days.

So 12x-22x our current $0.27 - Oooof

There definitely are. I think they're mostly little baby triwing screws. It can be pretty hard to design a product with just snap fits/adhesives and no fasteners.