 This week's IonMPI is from Amanda, and uh, Lady Union, what did you find this week? Okay, so this week it's a tool that I was like, I want this, and once in a while you'll see like, I do like very complicated boards, like last week's NXP series, which was sort of like this massive- So you're complicated. That's like- That's your complicated board. I think it was like it was a long line of PI, I wanted to cover this entire family. This one is a short and sweet one, but I'm very excited about this one because I personally wanted this tool. So this is the WIC gun by Mende Ezebrade. Ezebrade is like the sub-brand for braid, and then Mende's who made like the thing it clicks into. And this is like, this will get rid of your solder bridges as easily as John Wick gets rid of nasty bad guys. So yeah, coming to a theater near you, it's got a hundred percent on it. These coat promotions are getting out of hand. Yeah. Okay, look, I had a few minutes. I got my John Wick Happy Meal. I opened up Photoshop. Okay, so the WIC gun is, it's a tool that you would use with solder WIC. So any Dunny who has soldered knows that soldering is super fun and easy until you make a slight mistake, and then you got to get your tools out. Like here from Phil B's guide on removing the headers, sorry, the headers and connectors from Raspberry Pi. Upper left, you've got a desoldering tool, also known as a solder sucker. Top right is the flux. Use that to kind of keep the area clean, and it keeps the solder from sort of spraying everywhere. It makes it flow a little better and keeps it away from sticking to the PCB where it shouldn't. And then at the bottom right there, super WIC. So WIC is a braid. It's made out of copper, and it often has that flux inside of it or a rosin inside of it that makes it easy to clean solder joints, and then also the rosin kind of coats the solder joint and keeps it clean and unoxidized later. So usually what you start with is a solder sucker, you know, especially with two whole parts. Solder suckers are good when you have a lot of solder. You heat it up. You put the solder sucker up against it, and you press the button, and a little spring pulls back, and the solder goes up. And then you'll usually need to clean up afterwards with solder WIC. Like once in a while you can get away with just the solder desoldering pump or the solder sucker, but with SMT especially, or when you have, if you go back to, so I feel like this example for the Raspberry Pi, when you have like those big connectors, you see the USB connectors were removed, and solder suckers work really well when they are pressed up against like a solid blob, but if you're trying to clear out a hole or something or it has a hole in it, air will flow around the solder. So it needs to have like something to suction against, and then that's where WIC would come in, but WIC isn't good for huge blobs. Like it really quickly saturates. So it's good for like the little cleanups. So why don't you go ahead too? So here's showing, you know, after, you can see like the larger holes still have a little bit of solder in them, the chunky solder. You're not going to lose a solder sucker to get this out. That's where WIC comes in and just does the fine work. There are a bunch of really good videos on the GigiKey YouTube that you can watch if you'd like to learn about soldering and desoldering, including this one by Becky Stern only a couple of months ago. And then also a teaching moment has a really good guide on using flux and WIC to desolder and clean up solder joints. And there's also, I didn't put it here, but Sean Hemel also has a guide on soldering SMTQFN connectors. It doesn't cover WIC, but it could be handy. All right, so the 1000 WIC gun, how do you use it? So you get these cassettes and you pull out a little bit of WIC. I'll show you a little video later. You pull it through and there's a little roller at the top that you pull. And as you pull it, it feeds the solder WIC through. And then there's a little like nail clipper end. And when you pull the trigger, it cuts the WIC out. And so basically you can always make sure you have clean WIC. You know, actually maybe let's, I'll show it on the overhead because it's a little confusing if we can jump to the overhead real fast. And then I will. Do you have anything? No, no, no, I got it. Okay, so this is it. And then you can see as I move the trigger it, sorry, the the roller, the WIC is coming out. And then when I'm done, and this is the WIC, and then I would, you know, use it and, you know, solder, solder. And then when I'm done, you clip and you clean it off. And then you can get fresh WIC. Obviously I'm not going to solder live, but you know, that's the idea behind the WIC gun. And then this cassette comes out. It has 15 meters of braid. And of course you can get a new braid very easily. Okay, so let's go back to. Okay, so this tutorial shows you how to use it. You can take it apart to clean it if you have to. And then, yeah, you can also pull back like the drive knob works both ways. By the way, so if you like, if you feed too much out, you can always feed back. Okay, next one. Okay, so for options, so it does come with these cassettes, you know, so like once you, you can buy it with a cassette and then once you run out, you get new cassettes. It comes in different widths, number one through number five. And I think the one that I was just showing you is, I think a number, let's see, that was a number one. And then, let's see, I also have a number four. And I think the larger the number, the wider it is. It's probably it's basically the cartridge or is it that's it. You can reload the cartridge if you wanted to, but it's kind of a pain. And it's about the same price to just get like new solders. Like, oh yeah, so like this is the number four. So do you want to go with the overhead again? Yeah, just quickly I'll show the number four. So this is the number four and that's the number one. So it's approximate number of millimeters wide-ish about, you know, that's how wide it is. And then you, you know, the wider stuff is better with larger through holes. Here's the cassette chart. And then this is a cassette chart. So you can, you know, the cassettes themselves, you can pick up the Wittgen itself is like, you know, 20 bucks. And the cassettes are about 10 bucks a piece, 13 bucks a piece. And yes, you can load them by hand if you, if you want, there's no reason not to, they pop open and inside is just a real. But most wake comes in like these kind of plastic pop open containers or really large wheels. So you'll be sitting there and you'd be winding it. So it's up to you. Mend and EasyBreads also have a bunch of other tools. They have these nice bottles for isopropyl. They have little spudgers. They have diagonal cutters, et cetera, pliers. So check them out. There's a whole series available on Digki. But the thing that's really great about this, I'll tell you why this is so great, is when if you're using solder braid, you know that it's usually, okay, here's what you do. You're soldering and then like, oh no, you need to do some braid. So you put down a soldering iron, you pick up the braid, you have to pull out some and you're like kind of messing with the reel. And then you hold it in one hand and you position it and then you pick up the soldering iron again and then you do solder, then you put it down. And it's like, there's a lot of like, it's like fork knife, switch hands, move up and down. With this, it's one-handed. So, you know, as you're soldering, if you're like, you put down your solder and you're still sort of holding the iron, you can pull this out and then extend some wick out, clean up, and then change, you don't have to put down the soldering iron and you just go back and forth between solder and braid, which is what I really like. It's available on Digki. And it's in stock at Digki. Well, no, no, because they have all the different families. This is just the one no clean. Okay, quick, quick, quick, quick, quick bite. Yeah, but they have, like, there's like, 30 different types and there's like five to 10 of each one. We're so used to chip shortage like there's four is now it's fine Yeah, you'll find some because I picked like the number one which is the narrowest But you probably want like number two or number three They do have long stock Of course, I picked up you know one of the four and one of the one because I personally want this because I'm tired of Putting down the iron and stuff. We got a little short video and a video and it's in a good tick-tock format So we'll play that check it out. Well, of course Since tick-tock came along YouTube has their identical Yeah, and then so does everyone else it's funny It's like one format takes off and I was like I was scrolling through I had to look up some stuff And I'm just like wow YouTube is now filled with shorts. Yeah, cuz that's what they're calling them. Yeah, any who enjoy the format Yeah