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.
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.
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.
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..