It’s Only Wafer Thin

You’ve been warned not to click this video.  Maximising components for the Potato Pi requires a little engineering.  Fortunately, I’m willing to go to stupid lengths to do this.  I swear it has almost nothing to do with the price of copper nails on eBay. 

I lied.  It has everything to do with the cost of copper nails on eBay.  So I need to maximise my material usage to minimise cost.  My initial tests were done using a copper rod I cut a wafer from using an angle grinder.  This did 3 things:

• Cover my basement in copper dust.
• Waste a lot of copper.
• Probably had my housemate reviewing the decision to move in with me.

So that’s definitely not a good answer.  I’m considering a ghetto foundry and smelting the copper into wafers.  Obviously, I’ll look at the other options here first and the financial and house mate stress bearing of each.  The current ideas are:

1. Smelt and pour some copper wafers (means building another furnace)
2. Use copper circuitboard (comes with insulating plastic!)
3. Get someone else to do this (boring)

Depending on the price of the circuit board, that’s my favourite so far.

From the Zinc side of things, I’ve not really looked yet.  I’m thinking the local hardware store has that in sheets cheap enough already or, at worst, has galvanised nails.

To be continued…