Warning Digital Hazards Next 0xFA Miles.

This is a small experiment. It’s been a while; we don’t blagh much, because we are busy working on crap and being lazy. I might post these every once in a while, but don’t count on it. Also, yes, we are still alive, and more busy than ever before.

• Microscopes. Things have been getting smaller, so it was time we upgraded our optics. We have two new microscopes in the lab..

• An inspection scope for surface mount soldering and inspection (and anything else you’d like to look at using epi-illumination). It’s wired up to a crappy TV with a camera. Using a microscope on a low-latency screen like this is pure awesome. Here’s what sort of detail you can see with this system:

• The other microscope is still a work in progress, but is a 400x epi scope which was designed for Petrographic Ore imaging.   Strangely, we don’t have much Ore viewing going on, but if you look closely inside of things you see stuff like this:

• We’ve also been slowly setting up a chem lab, so we can decap our own chips.  Yay.

• Much in the way of high voltage stuff. We ran dueling tesla coils last weekend built by two different people.  Soon we’ll have three going at once, just for fun and safety.

• Costumes!

• Monthly PCB fab!  We get a board made monthly, and we all chip into it.  heh.

• We now have a makerbot!  It sometimes makes 3d stuff for us.  Hotpants.

• Crafty tools:  “cnc” embroidery machine. Serger.

• We can now sharpen drillbits.  Sweeet.

• There is tons of other little projects going on all of the time, but I wanted to push out some of the highlights which I think we can talk about.  :)

In summary: we are busy doing crazy projects; and we still don’t spend much time updating the blog.

Toorcamp was held at a Titan missile silo near Moses Lake, Washington in early July 2009.

We made a giant tent.

Though there were a few close calls, everyone survived.

Photos:

• adamcecc
• amatus2600
• Bre 1 / Bre 2
• hypatiadotca
• mattw
• pip
• rob

We recently had a chance to work with the fine folks at Intellectual Ventures to quantify some of what goes on with our coin shrinker. Using a bunch of neat gear (including an extremely high speed camera), we were able to learn all sorts of things about our amazing chamber of shrink. Here is some of what we learned:

• The coin shrinks in just 30 to 40 microseconds. Even when filming at 100,000 frames per second, that’s just 3 or 4 frames of video!
• By the time the coil begins to explode, the coin has already been shrunk for several microseconds!
• The collapsing coin gets extremely hot: the thinnest part of the center of a quarter glows bright white-red for a few microseconds just after shrinking.
• At one meter away from the spark gap, the shrinker generates a big bang: about 135 dB, or roughly as loud as a jet engine taking off from 100 meters away.
• The magnetic field created by the coil is extremely strong: at 10 cm from the coil (just on top of the lid of the blast chamber) we measured a peak field strength of 0.22 tesla, or about as strong as a small neodymium magnet.
• During the explosion, some of the bits of shrapnel fly past the camera’s view at about twice the speed of sound.
• The edge of the coin moves about 1/4″ in 36 microseconds, or roughly 400 miles per hour!

There’s a lot more info over on Intellectual Ventures’ blog. More photos of the camera rig and actual shrinkage are available here.