 okay did you key and a to present this week's ion mpi is from 3m that's right you know 3m they make all sorts of materials and tools and this week i saw this i this npi come up and i was like that's really useful i want that so sometimes we cover like really complicated technical like ai yeah next week we have like a face scanner yeah like we have something cool like crazy technological technological ones but this one is pretty straightforward and simple but you know i was thinking if you don't have this and you need it like yeah you're bummed most popular ion mpi's have been like oh my gosh i didn't know that existed that is only a couple bucks but yeah it's so useful all right so what is it this week is squeegees so this is um a squeegee uh there's two of them there's a gold one the blue one uh one's a little stiffer than the other and these are used um traditionally for applying vinyl um like graphics overlays onto glass or onto cars whenever you see like a car with like an overprint design on it or you see uh graphics um that are attached to the wall or to glass um these sorts of squeegees are used but i was actually thinking of using this for um squeegeeing paste or um vinyl appliques onto pcbs or panels or paste deposition i thought that's what it would be useful for so i picked up one of each um so they do come in two different like flavors they've got gold flavor and blue flavor um the gold applicator is kind of the most popular one and it's um stiffer but the blue one i think is what i might use it's nice and flexible so it's good for when you have a surface that you're applying a film or adhesive or whatever to and it's not like perfectly flat so in most videos that i looked around for videos um using these um applicators and gold was kind of the most popular i think blue is is maybe the new version that they're now available but i actually kind of like the blue a little bit more i don't know um so it's pretty straightforward you grab this and you just like squeegee it we have a little video all show as well but what i really like about these is it's just like it's just got that white nice mix of firm and uh flexible so show on the overhead this is the blue one so it's not silicone and it's not like a hard rubber it's kind of like in between it definitely feels like it would it like follows what i'm like if you know by my finger here it's cool about 3m as you know it's the most advanced tested whatever this is they're like this is the best possible material for what you're getting it to do well what i like about i'll tell you what i actually thought was nice but first of all there's only a couple bucks but um again if you really if you need to apply a film and you want it to come out flat like this would you know you want to use the real thing and you know even though these are not very expensive um they're even though they're they're reusable they they are the price of a disposable thing but the films that they are used to apply are extremely expensive so it's like you know that this has to be good because you wouldn't 3m wouldn't sell a thing to be used with their hundreds of dollars worth of film if this $2 tool would damage it you know what i mean like it's like they they had to do a good job with this because so many people are using this to apply very expensive films to very expensive surfaces um so the gold one is is definitely stiffer i feel like i mean i might use this i got one of each um the the blue one those i think what i'm going to use i like how it's soft um and i feel like it would it it would work really well for applying paste that's what i got it for because i get these stencils um and i have to apply um solder paste onto um pcb and i you know i don't like using metal i know that machines use metal squeegees but i find that it's really hard to get the good pressure application with metal if you're only using your hands you don't have this machine um so i really like this because it has just that right amount of flatness to push the paste down in but softness that it glides over the surface very well but not so soft that it gets damaged by um the stencil holes so i'm really liking this so i'm i'm glad i got this i kind of feel like if you need a squeegee and you don't have one you end up using like a credit card or something and that ends up causing problems also like we also sometimes have to apply screen protectors onto tfts or devices and we always end up with bubbles it's a little frustrating um when you use this you don't get bubbles so yeah like a two dollar thing that saves you a half an hour of trying to push bubbles out with your fingernails later and then uh there's a video we're going to show the video from 3m and then we're going to show it on the digikey website right and it's on the digikey site and you can get it um p a 1 bnd or the short year old digikey dot com four slash short four slash four seven t r r j yep so i recommend oh i recommend uh if you need to uh you know make you know this is only like a couple bucks they have a lot in stock put it in your cart so that next time you check out a digikey you'll get this free and you're gonna be like thank you past me for picking up one of these and that is this week's ian mpi