How the Nvidia Ruler Measures Up | Hacker News Reader

How the Nvidia Ruler Measures Up

blogs.nvidia.com

188 pointsbcaulfield39 comments

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Adafruit makes a nice ruler for a reasonable price:

https://www.adafruit.com/product/1554

as did eevBlog:

https://www.eevblog.com/projects/uruler/

Thanks for sharing, I was wondering if others existed

Also, lol, eevBlog:

> A handy 7″ PCB ruler, don’t settle for an average 6 incher!

Dave Jones is a riot, his videos are equally hilarious and informative. If you're interested at all in modern electronics I highly recommend giving them a watch.

I stumbled across his videos about a month ago and couldn't stop watching. Great stuff!

I saw some marketing material from a hard disk maker in the '80s that said something like 5 1/4 hard is better than 8 inches floppy.

I wonder how many complaints HR would receive nowadays if some marketing person put that in a draft they circulated for review?

AvE also has one: https://www.etsy.com/listing/464202928/one-rule-to-ruler-the...

Also has another variation https://www.etsy.com/listing/519921651/welders-ruler?ref=sho...

I immediately thought of this one. Perhaps more useful to the 99% of us who dont work with SMD. I am sure the 'detector' would provide amusement to a few people.

I'm pretty sure more than 1% of electrical engineers have worked with SMD - they're tough to avoid these days, unless you are strictly doing microelectronics, or a power engineer bolting things together with bus bars.

We are not all electrical engineers.

You won't even be a hobbyist for much longer, unless you make your peace with SMD.

Relax. It's fun. Assimilate.

Im finding SMD easier than through hole. Reflow the board and your soldering is done in one step.

And PCB production is so cheap and fast now.

Looks like that Adafruit ruler is a branded version of the PCB rulers that are all over eBay. They all have the same design with the phrase "one PCB to RULER them all" on the back.

The Adafruit ruler is open source (https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-PCB-Ruler) - I suspect the eBay ones are clones of it.

Given how prevelent these rulers are in the industry, it seems a little disingenuous for the article to make it sound like it was dreamed up from scratch. More like “this type of ruler is a good idea, we should have one of our own”.

This is not as good as NVidia ruler, unfortunately. From one of the Amazon reviews:

its neat, not as neat as the nvidia ruler that my boss showed me, i bought this one on a wim after my boss showed me the one his son got from nvidia, the nvidia one had alot more stuff because it was a 12" ruler, i either neglected to see this was a 6in ruler, but im pretty sure it didn't mention it before, it does now, but i got it and was totally disappointed at the tiny ruler..

We have something similar these all over the office, they come free w/large orders from digikey and mouser I think

https://www.mouser.com/images/adi-engineering-discovery-pcbr...

https://www.digikey.com/catalog/en/partgroup/pcb-ruler-12inc...

People are always swiping the digikey ones from our engineers.

DigiKey. Got a handful of them.

I like them, although the GFX USB drive[1] is even neater (in my opinion). That said I've got a minor collection of PCB rulers, one from Adafruit that they just threw in with my order one time, one from Digikey from Makerfaire, one from Digilent, and one from nVidia. One that I would like to get is the one that does various things[2] (its an active circuit), and I mocked up one with an e-paper 'edge' where you could set what ever scale you wanted but the cost of a custom e-paper display was going to be $35K NRE! And then the displays themselves were about $50 each in relatively small quantities.

[1] https://www.geforce.com/gtx-g-assist -- and no it doesn't really play your games it is just a nice USB 3.0 flash drive :-)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2p3EYFlwCU

Great April Fool's prank.

... Right?

> https://www.geforce.com/gtx-g-assist

Mozilla Firefox: Content Encoding Error. The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression. Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

Google Chrome: This site can’t be reached. ERR_CONTENT_DECODING_FAILED.

Hah, I guess the traffic borked it. Here was some coverage from PC Gamer on it: http://www.pcgamer.com/nvidias-geforce-gtx-usb-drive-is-real...

I got a couple of DigiRule's [0] from their kickstarter [1] a few years ago which was kinda fun. It has interactive logic gates, flip flops, a 4 bit counter and a handful of different modes.

On the back you get some truth tables and some common pads and size holes. Selling for $11 [2]

[0] https://www.bradsprojects.com/the-digirule/

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1897710270/digirule-the...

[2] https://www.tindie.com/stores/bradsprojects/

These rulers are pretty popular as goodies Nvidia hands out at career fairs (along with socks). I see these every semester at the CMU job fair.

They're popular enough they go out of stock in the employee store pretty often; I had to wait a month to get one for buddy.

It's pretty neat even if it basically just sits on my desk. I think I've used it more times as a square edge than as a ruler.

Digikey sent me a similar ruler for free without me even asking. Everyone and their mother has or makes one of these.

If this is the most coveted item in their employee store, they must not have anything good in their store.

In our office we taped the free Ikea roll-up fabric rulers to desks for quick measuring.

I like your style :)

Cheap PCB rulers can be found on ebay. I had one bought for my professor as a bribery/flattery present when I was at the university.

The Nvidia one looks quite a bit nicer than your average eBay ruler though... full 12", two color silkscreen, ENIG finish, and some crazy tiny-pitch BGA footprints. The component layout is also not haphazard like most of the other rulers I've seen; it's much more of a work of art.

I definitely want one.

And of courses it uses actual nvidia parts which is convenient for nvidia engineers.

I assure you, that is not a two-color silkscreen. The green NVIDIA 'eye' logo is much more likely a second manufacturing process (confusingly also a silkscreen or pad printing process) that was done after the boards were received from the fab, or drop-shipped to a screenprinting company.

I would be very, very surprised if the green eye logo was done in-house at the fab.

Is there an NVidia career fair in San Diego (UCSD? SDSU?). Huge ruler nerd (also, pencils, calculators, engineering paper, etc).

I received this ruler from a career fair this year. It's very well built, and I hang it up on the wall in front of my desk

If you are hosted by an employee, they are available for sale to visitors. It's super awesome indeed and bought one.

Now i want one. Didn't care 5 minutes ago when i didn't knew about it...

And while others posted similar ruler, they don't look as nice as the nvidia one.

One of their partners in Toronto handed me one of these at Big Data/AI Toronto this past spring. I like it a lot.

I want one of these so bad... :/

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