[Dan Julio] Owns a pair of miniware multimeter tweezers, a Nifty tool for exploring SMDs. One day, he saw them broken – unable to recognize any element between the two probes. He thought it might be a broken connection problem, and decided to separate them. The presence of some screws in their case made him a fool – in the end, it turned out that the case was stuck together and could only be opened destructively. For an entry into the 2022 Hackaday Award “Reuse, Reuse, Reconstruction” round, he tells us how he brought these tweezers back from the dead.
While dismantling, he broke a custom flexible PCB, which was not reassuring. However, there was no reason to give it up – he re-engineered the connections and charging circuitry, then assembled the parts of the broken tweezers using a small generic protoboard as a base. In fact, it was probably a broken connection between the probes, because the reassembled tweezers worked!
Of course, the PCB would not be released, and from the beginning, putting these tweezers together was not an option. Instead, he created a replacement case in OpenSCAD, reviving tweezers as his trusted tool – and still putting repairs on the table. If you are interested in the details, he can go further about how these tweezers are designed for charging and connection and we recommend that you read his article!
From commercially created reviews and hacks to DIY chopstick-based and PCB-based, we’ve been seeing smart tweezers for over a decade. If you already own a pair of tweezers that you have attached, you can recover them nicely with a capacitance sensing function!