These micro-MELF diodes are a little over a millimeter tall. Normally they’re arranged in an orderly fashion in a tape, so a robotic pick-and-place system can grab them individually and place them on a printed circuit board. Not today! They spilled out. Is there a way to self assemble them onto a surface? People have been working on that for a while:
Wei Zheng, Jaehoon Chung, and H. O. Jacobs, “Fluidic heterogeneous microsystems assembly and packaging,” J. Microelectromech. Syst., vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 864–870, Aug. 2006.
But the video above shows they are also a little magnetic, and might be put into position using guiding structures. Now if we can get them all facing the same direction…
Slightly bigger ones, all packed up in tape:
(from https://www.amazon.com/Vishay-ZM4747A-12-5mA-Silicon-Planar/dp/B01F2I6SWS)