surface mount diodes are simple enough — all you need to do is make sure you have the anode and cathode in the right order when you place them on the pad when you solder them. These SMD diodes come in industry-standard packages, but do you think there’s an industry-standard way of marking the cathode? Nope, not by a long shot. To solve the problem of figuring out which way the electrons go through his LEDs, [Jesus] built a simple pair of LED tweezers.

The purpose of these tweezers is to figure out which way is up on a LED. To do this, [Jesus] picked up a pair of multimeter and power supply compatible SMD test clips that are sufficiently tweezy. These tweezers come with red and black wires coming out the back, but cutting those leads off, peeling back the insulation and adding a CR2032 battery holder and 220Ω resistor turns these tweezers from a probe into an electrified poker.

To figure out what the arcane symbols on the bottom of an SMD diode mean, all [Jesus] has to do is touch each side of the pair of tweezers to one of the contacts on a LED. If it lights up, it’s that way around. If it doesn’t light up, the battery is dead, or the diode is backwards. It’s a terrific project, especially since these SMD test clip tweezer things can be had from the usual online retailers for just a few bucks. We would recommend a switch and marking which tweeze is ground, though.