They almost got away with it. The attention to detail was sooo close… Continue reading

I wanted to try and make my own transistors and diodes, and see what I could make with things you can find in your house. So I purchased some reject wafers / tests on ebay cheep. (close to 20 lbs worth :D )
Continue reading

So a few days ago I was in my lab as always…
when I start hearing this pop pop pop pop sound…
I didn’t know what It was till today…
Continue reading

I have successfully made my own transistor using a piece of germanium, some copper wire and my 3doodler.
 
Continue reading

Got this neat system cheep.
Continue reading

Caution do this at your own risk. I blew mine out so you don’t have to!

That said. Here is how I got my block erupter overclocked to 56o MHz briefly before it died.
Continue reading

I got this nifty piece of history cheep at a local estate sale.
Continue reading

A simple light bulb change lead to disaster this morning.
Continue reading

Warning! Nitric Acid is nasty stuff to play around with. I did this so you don’t have to! Do not attempt to do this yourself or you may end up dead!
So today I wanted to try and decapsulate some chips to see how they were laid out inside.

This was my first attempt. A Leapfrog L1000 arm chip.
Not sure if I etched everything off or this is some sort of copper obfuscation layer.

The other side looks like the standard back of a chip.
Next I attempted one of those custom glued down chips from a older leapfrog toy.
results were much better.

This is one really nice chip to look at :)






Some sort of die marking of who really made the chip. I couldn’t get a clear image of it.
This is at 500x zoom on my microscop

Next up I did a old DEC scsi chip




lastly a simple 8 pin eprom chip



 

I got the power wired up to day. Everything is good!
Continue reading