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
Apologies for site being down. Some pesky malware managed to find its way in and overwrite a bunch of system files. Things should be back to normal, but if anything is misbehaving, leave me a comment
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
Today we have two tiny multimeters to take apart and see what we can learn from how their designs progressed:
On the left is Hioki 3217 and on the right – Beckman DM78
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.
Schick Hydro 5
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
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!
Today we are unpacking a brand new LCR meter from a company called Tonghui in China. It was purchased on ebay and took less than a week to arrive.
Chinese market packaging
In the usual Kuzyatech fashion, when something breaks, we must take it apart. Today, one of the “early adopter” GU10 style LED lamps decided to fail mechanically:
We have a problem
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