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What is the most useful tool you ever made?

dougw

There are many great topics that relate to tools, and there are endless numbers of tools to discuss, but inevitably we run into situations where we don't have a good tool for the job and have to cobble a tool together to complete the work.

I make some little tool to do a specific job all the time, but I never stop to think whether it is a remarkable tool. I don't even document that  I made a tool.

I don't think we ever asked the question - what is the best tool you ever made, so I'm asking now. If you are like me it is going to take some time to recall something significant. In fact I am posting this question before I even have my own answer, but give it some thought. I suspect the answers will be interesting.

My most recent tool was just a wooden needle to apply ink to a 3D print - much more precise than a paint brush. I'm sure when I scan through some of my projects, I will come up with something better....

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  • I'm not saying this is the most useful - but it is handy.

    I use the Keil MDK toolset for developing with ARM Cortex processors.

    It uses its own format to describe the project and its different build options etc etc.

    I've asked them several times to make a project cloning tool but they never did, so several years ago I wrote my own (in VB6)

    You have to stick to some rules in creating the project from which you clone but it does quite well at changing all the file names, the IDE files and all the references to the file names in source files (header and code).

    It saves about a day of tedious work when you clone a reasonable sized project (20 source files approx).

    It's not that polished - I usually run it from the VB IDE interpreter so I can fix errors as they happen.

    MK

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  • I'm not saying this is the most useful - but it is handy.

    I use the Keil MDK toolset for developing with ARM Cortex processors.

    It uses its own format to describe the project and its different build options etc etc.

    I've asked them several times to make a project cloning tool but they never did, so several years ago I wrote my own (in VB6)

    You have to stick to some rules in creating the project from which you clone but it does quite well at changing all the file names, the IDE files and all the references to the file names in source files (header and code).

    It saves about a day of tedious work when you clone a reasonable sized project (20 source files approx).

    It's not that polished - I usually run it from the VB IDE interpreter so I can fix errors as they happen.

    MK

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