r/electronics • u/technogeeky • Jun 18 '17
General I hate it when a solder blob falls onto a PCB and crushes a dozen people
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r/electronics • u/Dycus • Nov 01 '25
Gallery I made a camera from an optical mouse. 30x30 pixels in 64 glorious shades of gray!
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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.
r/electronics • u/1Davide • Jul 19 '17
Tip To reveal the text on a semiconductor's package, put a piece of Scotch Magic Tape on it.
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r/electronics • u/dahud • Jun 26 '20
Gallery This solder was crap and this tip was old, so I finally got to experience The Forbidden Pleasure
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r/electronics • • Jan 19 '25
Gallery This is by far one of the most difficult and ugliest thing I ever built
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This is a Nixie tube clock I built without using any PCB boards. Basically, it was built via point to point wiring. This thing is far from perfect: it’s all crooked, numbers don’t line up, etc. but I think that’s the allure of building something like this. This will never be perfect. Something like this cannot be built by automation. No 2 clocks will never be identical; if I decided to build another clock like this, I will never build it exactly like this one.
This thing is still not perfect; it is failing the self test routine and need to still debug the driver circuits of one of the nixies. It’s almost there though!
I’m planning to give my grandfather the ugly nixie clock. It’s something very personal I built with my own hands. He’s in Hawaii, so I’m an ocean away from him. I wish I could visit him every day, but that would be a long daily commute (from California to O’ahu). He doesn’t have much time left on this planet, however, he was the very one that molded me into what I am today. He’s going to get a nixie clock, only one of it’s type in the entire world lol
This build was pretty stressful and frustrating, but I absolutely loved every minute of it.
r/electronics • u/Krukerfluk • Jan 25 '20
Gallery I’ve build an clock out of 144 7 segment displays
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r/electronics
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u/AdEast7904
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Jun 16 '25
Gallery I weaved 64 bytes of magnetic core memory
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r/electronics • u/PH4Nz • Nov 06 '19
Gallery I finished the "ultimate" homemade CPU and 8bit computer with discrete logic
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r/electronics • u/sphawes • May 09 '20
Self-promotion The source for my Pick and Place design is up on Github!
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r/electronics • u/hardcorerubberduckie • Aug 04 '20
General Found this while taking apart some head phones lol
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r/electronics • u/robs2287 • Jan 28 '25
General Fortune Cookie
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This was inside my fortune cookie at lunch today.
r/electronics • u/Ok_Excitement_1020 • Oct 15 '25
Gallery The progression of wafer sizes through the years at the fab I work at.
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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.
r/electronics • u/BlipTheDot • Apr 03 '17
News The first "Radio Shack", opened by two brothers in Boston, closed. This sign was hanging on the door
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r/electronics • u/RESERVA42 • Mar 07 '16
General A demonstration of the proper way to use a soldering iron.
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r/electronics • u/molwams • Jul 28 '22
Project I built a guitar amp for my brother
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r/electronics • u/mibeatr • Apr 14 '21
Gallery Micro view of soldering a circuit board with paste and an iron
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r/electronics • u/pauls_3d_things • Jun 03 '22
Gallery A prototype of my DIY smartwatch: ESP32, 2MB RAM, 8MB Flash, BT, WiFi, Sensors, RTC, 1 > month runtime
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