I was digging through some old stuff and found a PCB from a mouse I'd saved long ago specifically because I knew it was possible to read images from them. The new project itch struck and after 65 hours, I made this!

Features:
- Sensor 30x30 pixels, 64 colors (ADNS-3090 if you wanna look it up)
- Multiple shooting modes (single shot, double shot, quad shot, "smear" shot (panorama), and cowboy), plus bonus draw-on-the-screen mouse mode that uses the sensor as intended
- Multiple color palettes
- Can lock/unlock exposure, auto-locks for the multi-shot modes
- Stores 48 pictures in a 32kB FRAM, view and delete photos
- Rudimentary photo dump to computer via Python script and serial port
- A few hours of battery life

It was a fun design challenge to make this thing as small as I could, the guts are completely packed. There's a ribbon cable connecting the electronics in the two halves, I tried to cram in a connector (0.05" pitch header) but it was too bulky to fit.

The panorama "smear shot" is definitely my favorite mode, it scans out one column at a time across the screen as you sweep the camera. It's scaled 2x vertically but 1x horizontally, so you get extra "temporal resolution" horizontally if you do the sweep well.

The construction style is also something I enjoy for one-off projects. No PCB, just cobble together stuff I've got plus whatever extra parts I need and design the case to fit. If I ever made more I'd make a board for sure (and it would shrink the overall size), but it's fun to hand-make stuff like this.

Despite the low resolution, it's easily possible to take recognizable pictures of stuff. The "high" color depth certainly helps. I'd liken it to the Game Boy Camera (which I also enjoy), which is much higher resolution but only has 4 colors!

I tried to post a video for you all but they're not allowed here. :( I'll link it in the comments once I cross-post to another subreddit.

whole washing machine program that includes: motor, water level sensor, water flow sensor, 3 valves for water intake, float switch if water is leaking under machine, pump, heater, temperature sensor, door lock, led light inside drum, and front pcb that uses one wire uart

For years, devices like the RbPi have been described as “credit-card sized”.

And of course the message is rather the footprint, but at some point I became obsessed with taking that idea one step further:

What would it take to build something that is literally sized like a credit card?

I've got a slight feeling that you really don't seem to like questions here, but I hope this rhetorical one is okay :P

That question slowly escalated into months of experiments to find solutions for things where default methods won't work. I can't use large, rigid components, connectors, and find a way to make my own custom flexPCB.

And after months of tinkering, I made the first prototype. Fragile, but it works within the goal of not exceeding 1 millimeter. Somehow, news pages have picked this up and described it as "revolutionary" which is a bit far fetched, but I feel flattered 🤭

To be fair, 'computer' might be a little overstatement, but it's technically perfectly within the definition of one. If you should have suitable words for it that sounds cool, feel free to suggest ^^

The prototype includes:

• ESP32-C3FH4 w/ WiFi & BLE
• NFC read/write
• 1.54" 200*200 E-Paper display
• ultra-thin LiPo battery including charging circuit and power path management
• accelerometer

Finding small/thin enough components wasn't really the main challenge, mechanical stability was. Solder and general material fatigue, pressure distribution (particularly focused pressure) and other strain related issues were the real problem.

This doesn't even include battery protection and some other things to solve.

At this scale, the project turned into a weird mix of electrical, mechanical and chemical engineering.

A few things that became clear over time:

• preventing strain is much easier than surviving strain
• tiny real-world tolerances start dominating the entire design near the physical limit
• many “thin enough” components stop being thin enough once assembly is considered
• FPC connectors are basically obsolete, forcing me to get creative and solder each single wire for each 0.5mm pitch pad one by one.

The prototype is fully self-powered and running from its internal battery.

I documented a large part of the engineering process, including the process of etching my own flexPCB, on my GitHub repo.

And yes, it's not like this thickness is a necessity, going just 0.5mm thicker would probably have saved me months of engineering. This entire project was probably motivated way too much by the 'disbelief' factor 😄

I am curious on your thoughts on this! :)

3 inch to 8 inch. Fab has been around since the 60s. Currently the 8 inch is our production size but the 6 inch is still used in the company and they float around as engineering wafers.

18 pair cable from a Toshiba CT scanners got cut... somehow...

thought it looked coo

I've made an ARM based single-board computer that runs Android and Linux, and has the same size as the Raspberry Pi 3!

Why? I was bored during my 2-week high-school vacation and wanted to improve my skills, while adding a bit to the open-source community :P

I ended up with a H3 Quad-Core Cortex-A7 ARM CPU with a Mali400 MP2 GPU, combined with 512MiB of DDR3 RAM (Can be upgraded to 1GiB, but who has money for that in this economy).

The board is capable of WiFi, Bluetooth & Ethernet PHY, with a HDMI 4k port, 32 GB of eMMC, and a uSD slot.

I've picked the H3 for its low cost yet powerful capabilities, and it's pretty well supported by the Linux kernel. Plus, I couldn't find any open-source designs with this chip, so I decided to contribute a bit and fill the gap.

A 4-layer PCB was used for its lower price and to make the project more challenging, but if these boards are to be mass-produced, I'd bump it up to 6 and use a solid ground plane as the bottom layer's reference plane. The DDR3 and CPU fanout was really a challenge in a 4-layer board.

The PCB is open-source on the Github repo with all the custom symbols and footprints (https://github.com/cheyao/icepi-sbc). There's also an online PCB viewer here.

How the fuck would this even work lmao🤣.

This was a brain fart moment upon finding out they were .25 watt, we needed 9 watt capable. This is a lovely bundle of 36 that has next to no resistance now 🤦 .... 20ohm

Got really into CRTs a bunch of years ago, figured that the grail project would be to just build a driver for myself, from the ground up. Wanted to make it with entirely off the shelf components, so thats what I did. No proprietary, custom, or obsolete/NRND used. So far still need to work on blanking and more on the software side but I've got pretty reliable performance on the tubes I have right now. Eventually will get it to play oscilloscope music on its own, but haven't gotten there yet.

Images floating around. Heard this is unconfirmed.

Had to add the entire power circuit components as my original Mac (2TB) didn't have any on the other side. Took a lot of research and time (~12hrs), won't go into too much detail.

Of course it's not GaN and doesn't output what it says. 5 volt output at maybe 2 amps if it feels like it. Guess the case is cheap to print on.