RedSnapper! Tweaking an Open Source design

Pretty ain't it? What is it you ask? Well it's five bits of acrylic, etched and arranged in such a way that it makes snapping pin headers down to size an easier and more repeatable job. 

It's not our idea originally, it's Oomlout's. Aaron built the WHSN and open sourced it on thingiverse. When we started kitting the Shrimping.it we build a slightly modified WHSN, using only M3 fixings as that's all we had to hand. It's a really great tool and a great time saver which makes snapping headers for kits just that bit quicker and therefore less tedious. All was well and we went back to the real world happy, contented and with lots of snapped headers for our kits.

However that's not the end of the story... it managed to wangle its way into the part of the brain that obsesses over details. The pin headers we sell are 40 pin and the WHSN will do a good job of snapping them, but why does it have to be so big? If I want a 32 Pin I don't need to put the whole row in and snap off 8 from the end, I set it to 8 and snap off the 32 right? I could make it smaller, half the length and keeping the proportions that uses approximately 1/4 of the acrylic - this was getting exciting (for me anyway!). The RedSnapper was born!

Further tweaks followed. The ratio of length to width was a little off the golden ratio, so we fixed that.The bill of materials is simplified from the original as already mentioned 4-5 M3 Screws and nuts and you're golden. We made the slider longer than the rest of the Snapper so you'll never get it stuck inside and have to take the whole thing apart. We added two vector cuts to the end of the slider too, so you can get your nail in to pull it. The slider got a lot of attention actually as we also removed the extra holes and made it so you line up the end of it with the measure to get your desired length.

Lastly we adjusted the measure, adding a line for every second pin and changing the numbering to 10 and 20. I think it's now a pretty solid little product which can be found in our store. This is the 2.54mm version, we've already had requests for a 2mm version too.

 

 

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