I immediately thought of this one. Perhaps more useful to the 99% of us who dont work with SMD. I am sure the 'detector' would provide amusement to a few people.
I'm pretty sure more than 1% of electrical engineers have worked with SMD - they're tough to avoid these days, unless you are strictly doing microelectronics, or a power engineer bolting things together with bus bars.
Dave Jones is a riot, his videos are equally hilarious and informative. If you're interested at all in modern electronics I highly recommend giving them a watch.
Looks like that Adafruit ruler is a branded version of the PCB rulers that are all over eBay. They all have the same design with the phrase "one PCB to RULER them all" on the back.
Given how prevelent these rulers are in the industry, it seems a little disingenuous for the article to make it sound like it was dreamed up from scratch. More like “this type of ruler is a good idea, we should have one of our own”.
This is not as good as NVidia ruler, unfortunately. From one of the Amazon reviews:
its neat, not as neat as the nvidia ruler that my boss showed me, i bought this one on a wim after my boss showed me the one his son got from nvidia, the nvidia one had alot more stuff because it was a 12" ruler, i either neglected to see this was a 6in ruler, but im pretty sure it didn't mention it before, it does now, but i got it and was totally disappointed at the tiny ruler..
I like them, although the GFX USB drive[1] is even neater (in my opinion). That said I've got a minor collection of PCB rulers, one from Adafruit that they just threw in with my order one time, one from Digikey from Makerfaire, one from Digilent, and one from nVidia. One that I would like to get is the one that does various things[2] (its an active circuit), and I mocked up one with an e-paper 'edge' where you could set what ever scale you wanted but the cost of a custom e-paper display was going to be $35K NRE! And then the displays themselves were about $50 each in relatively small quantities.
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I got a couple of DigiRule's [0] from their kickstarter [1] a few years ago which was kinda fun. It has interactive logic gates, flip flops, a 4 bit counter and a handful of different modes.
On the back you get some truth tables and some common pads and size holes. Selling for $11 [2]
The Nvidia one looks quite a bit nicer than your average eBay ruler though... full 12", two color silkscreen, ENIG finish, and some crazy tiny-pitch BGA footprints. The component layout is also not haphazard like most of the other rulers I've seen; it's much more of a work of art.
I assure you, that is not a two-color silkscreen. The green NVIDIA 'eye' logo is much more likely a second manufacturing process (confusingly also a silkscreen or pad printing process) that was done after the boards were received from the fab, or drop-shipped to a screenprinting company.
I would be very, very surprised if the green eye logo was done in-house at the fab.
https://www.adafruit.com/product/1554
as did eevBlog:
https://www.eevblog.com/projects/uruler/