Sometimes a silly idea is just a silly idea. Other times, something that seemed a little ridiculous in the beginning can morph into a rather useful project. Such appears to be the case with the Moonphase experiment LED tester by MakerProbe.
The idea, as tracked on Hackaday.io, was to examine the effect of the moon phase on tombstoning (i.e. components flipping up) of small (0201) parts during the PCB reflow process. You can draw your own conclusions from the results, but the tombstoning test PCB is itself designed as a surface mount LED tester. Resistors and contacts on this PCB are arranged in such a way that you can easily examine polarity of LEDs, and the resulting brightness from different resistance values.
Power for this test/tester can be provided via a coin cell, USB, or arbitrary inputs via a 2-pin header breakout. One could even see this being used with a microcontroller to examine the effects of PWM or other pulsing methods in very low power applications.
If you are concerned about the effect of moon phase on your tester’s quality, you can contact MakerProbe to specify this factor. It’s the type of service you only get on Tindie… and perhaps only on this one particular listing!
