Optical mouse, the old way

Today’s topic is somewhat unique- a vintage optical mouse, made in the days when it was not very trivial. It’s not like you can just slap a camera in and have it take pictures to figure out where things move. In the old days you had to actually design it, maybe even using some 2N3906 and 555 timers as we’ll find out. Let’s start with unboxing (pardon the masking tape holding things together)

Vintage find

Vintage find

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FrankenPad part deux

Hot on the heels of a touchpad swap in my “new” Thinkpad T440P, come the next two upgrades: backlit keyboard and an IPS display. I shall call this machine Frankenpad as it’s rapidly deviating from the original configuration (20AWS series).

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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Watchdog Water Alarm teardown

Today we have a somewhat vintage teardown. Even though you can still buy this Watchdog BWD-HWA Water Alarm in home stores and online, the design itself probably goes quite a few decades back as we’ll see below. We’ll also learn a few things about low power design. Rumor has it these last forever on a nine volt battery!

Front view

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