Vaccuum Desolderer; Pump replacement overkill.

Heya. starting a small hackerspace with some guys.
I’m the resident electronics dude, so i’ve taken it upon myself to get a semi-decent lab going.
I already got a fairly decent digital soldering station there.
However, at work we have these super sweet Hakko vacuum-desolderers and i’m absolutely addicted.
A sucker would be a blessing when salvaging parts and such.
Enter the old solderstation from way before i was ever employed at my company. donated to me.

This combi rig seemed decent for its age but the pump was terrible. if the legends around the office are true, it has always been terrible.
My brother, TinkarLjarl suggested i try this pump. a 350w mains driven vaccuum pump!.

Size comparison:

Never thinking i’d actually use it, i went along and hooked up the hose and he plugged it in while i tried to desolder some components.
A bit loud, but it worked like a charm!

Seeing as these pumps have never been of use to the company, and my boss never explicitly saying no, I got to work after hours at the office.

The carrier plate for the pumps looked useful for making this beast more manuverable, so i got one pump off..

..and bolted the station snugly it its place.

A quick relay board for driving the thing, triggered by the old pumps 24v. fuse for good measure.

Cut open a slot for the vacuum and pump mains with a hacksaw. ugly but functional.

Heatshrink muffler.

Works good. the relay sparks like crazy so i might go SSR when the contacts go bad.(they will!)

And there you have it! weighing in at 18Kg its not for lugging around.
A bit of a pain to get to the hackerspace.
going from 8w to 350w will put on some weight.

ZIF socket atTiny programmer

Hey. First post here on the page.
This project is fairly simple but i find it useful.
I did this early December after i found an orphaned 20pin ZIF socket at work and figured i wanted to program 2313’s.

It is just a permanent Arduino ISP programmer with 3 4052 multiplexers to switch between the pinouts for the attiny85,84 and 2313.
The 4052 address pins are pulled down and set with a sp3t switch. I’ve seen shields using 3 sixway dipswitches. this seemed impractical to me.

My nano is mounted on headers and not modified in any way. I might need it for something else one day.
The leds are heartbeat/error/programming indicators

Not as pretty underneath, i used this stripboard that is cut every three holes. i find these practical when working with ic’s.

The predecessor was an old shield with ic sockets for 85 and 84.

Nest step adding a six ISP header so i can mess with ISP programming of atmega8s and other avrs by converting the arduino files to hex and programming through AVRdude