I had two excellent “there’s a tool for that” moments this past weekend.

First, as a friend and I were working on his workbench, made from old hunks of bowling alley, we came across a screw that’d broken off in the wood. With nothing to grip, it would’ve taken some serious digging around (and damaging the wood top more than necessary) to get the screw out. Fortunately, we had a screw extractor set handy, and in just a couple minutes were back on track.

Second, that same friend was helping me debug an issue I was having with the robot arm, namely when I tried to have it draw a square, it would actually draw a parallelogram. It turned out I needed to calibrate the motor encoder-to-joint angle conversion, and he suggested using this digital angle gauge. It worked like a charm (and I’m looking forward to using it in the woodshop as well), and now it’s drawing perfect squares and well on its way to becoming bartender.