The pith helmet’s light weight made it comfortable to wear in the hot environment. ![]() The new pith helmet was designated the modal 1940 and would see service with members of the DAK until the theater’s collapse in Tunis in May 1943. In July of 1940 the task of developing this new uniform was handed over to the Tropical Institute of the University of Hamburg. The institute designed an entirely new lightweight cotton uniform and cork pith helmet which would replace the wool uniforms and steel helmet used in the European theater. Both wear the so called M1940 Pith Helmet A German soldier waits while his companion makes repairs on his tunic. North Africa with it’s extreme climate and desolate landscapes would require unique uniforms and headgear suitable for what the new Deutches Afrika korps or DAK would experience there. When Adolf Hitler agreed to send an expeditionary force to North Africa to shore up his beleaguered Italian ally, it was understood by the German military planners that the conditions which this force would be fighting in were different than any front the Germans had hither to served in. On the upside a failure would motivate me to go find another red LED somewhere.Oberstleutnant Georg Briel wearing a M40 helmet with a heavily worn tan camouflaged finish A Helmet for a Desert Front I would not have been surprised if the blue LED had failed after all this gross abuse. So now I get to practice LED removal once again, followed by soldering it back on the correct way. Valuable lesson: LED manufacturers are not consistent about how they used the little bit of green on a LED to indicate polarity. Pulling out the LED tester again I confirmed I have soldered it on backwards. It then occurred to me I should have verified the polarity of the LED. I turned on the badge and… the LED stayed dark. I could see a little bit of green on one side of the LED indicating polarity, so I lined it up to be consistent with the rest of the LEDs on the badge. After I cleaned up the badge LED pads, I was able to solder one side of the salvaged LED then the other. I might be getting the hang of this? Every LED removal was easier than the last, but I still think a hot air station would make this easier. Once I removed it intact, I tossed it aside and used my newfound (ha!) skill to successfully remove the blue LED in one piece. It came apart in two pieces, so I practiced removal again with the dead red LED on my ESP32 dev module. Lacking a hot air rework station or a hot plate, I didn’t have a good way to heat up both sides of a LED so there was a lot of clumsy application of solder and flux as I worked to remove the dead badge LED. This is a practice exercise with low odds of success anyway. ![]() Between “keep looking for a red LED” and “use the blue one in my hand” I chose the latter out of laziness. I probed the red LED and found it dead, but the blue LED lit up fine. This module has a red LED for power and a blue LED for status. Looking in my pile of electronics for a suitable doner, I picked out my ESP32 dev module with a flawed voltage regulator that went up in smoke with 13V DC input (when it should have been able to handle up to 15V DC). The other one stayed dark even with test probe and would need to be replaced. One of them would illuminate with the test probe in place, and a dab of solder was enough to make proper electrical connection and bring it to life. (SMD for surface-mount devices, or SMT for surface-mount technology.) One relatively new tool is a dedicated LED tester, and I used it to probe the two dark LEDs. And while my skills are better than they were when I was originally gifted with the badge, it’s still far from “skilled” at surface mount stuff. I’m missing a few tools that I thought would be useful, like a heat plate or hot air rework station. ![]() I unearthed it again during a recent workshop cleanup and decided it was a good time to check my current surface mount skill level. I thought trying to fix it would be a good practice exercise for working with surface-mount electronics, and set it aside for later. ![]() After a long story that isn’t relevant right now, I eventually ended up with a single unit from that batch with (at least) two dark LEDs in its 18×18=324 array of LEDs. Robot Badge” that were deemed defective for one reason or another. Years ago at a past Hackaday Superconference, I had the chance to play with a small batch of “ Mr.
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