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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1mm pitch flex cable passthrough

By popular demand, the breakout/passthrough combination boards family now includes a 1mm pitch variant:

This version handles up to 30 signals which seems to be a practical limit of most 1mm FPC connectors. Each signal is numbered and brought to a 0.1 in spacing header for easy connection to your favorite logger/analyzer/scope. Continue reading

Schick Hydro 5 razor teardown

Today’s teardown subject has been waiting for its turn for a while- I picked it up at the last Design East conference in Boston in 2012. There, Microchip and Energizer were talking about low power design and using these Schick Hydro 5 power razors as an example. Hot on the heels of my repair of a Philips Sonicare toothbrush, this seems to be a good fit for a comparison. Both things do essentially the same thing- they shake, light up some LEDs and not much else.

Product unpacking

Schick Hydro 5

Schick Hydro 5

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Philips Sonicare HX6710 teardown and repair

Today we have a new subject to tear down- my own Sonicare toothbrush. At the end of a brushing cycle it made a short “Beep” noise and went silent. No reaction to button press or to putting it on a charger. No lights, sounds or anything. Oh well, might as well take it apart.

Philips Sonicare

Philips Sonicare

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2013 Rochester Hamfest at RIT

It’s been year and the RIT Hamfest is once again upon us. A few pictures of interesting things we stumbled on. I can’t claim to know what some of them are though!

Kidde KN-COEG-3 carbon monoxide/gas alarm teardown

In continuation of Carbon Monoxide teardowns, we now have a Kidde KN-COEG-3 detector designed to handle both carbon monoxide and natural gas in residential use. Unlike the previous target (First Alert FCD2BT), this one never worked that well, causing frequent “GAS” false panics and piercing alarms, so a teardown is a natural progression for this model! Continue reading