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Intel Experience Store – Day 17 Recap: Some days are tidying days.

by Carlyn Maw on January 20, 2014, no comments

What a Mess.

What a Mess.

TL;DR The Intel Experience Store has extended it’s run from the original date of January 25th until January 30th. I could have lasted until the end of this week with the mess we’ve made, but I couldn’t make it through two. So I cleaned and organized the best I could on Friday, blowing through the semi-dismantled and abandoned items in our bench’s eWaste cubby. The result was mostly catharsis, but some found-object cartoons made the day still feel creatively rewarding. 

And now it's clean.

The end result!

The anatomy of this gig is that we have 3 people sharing tools, resources and storage space with no overlapping shifts to talk organizational strategies. Thankfully, Jen and Barb are a pleasure to work with so I was fine taking one for the team to do a deep tidy of our downstairs eWaste cubby. Random boards and scraps covered the good stuff. We now can see the best of what we have.

Faces everywhere

Scrap cartoons

Informal Rorschach tests with some the random detritus we had floating around the bin resulted in a collection of creatures. When digging through the scrap, if I saw something that triggered face recognition neurons, I drew on it. Magnets hold the scrap cartoons in place on a metal case bent into a display. Goofyness feels good.

Chip-On-Board in a cheap calculator

Chip-On-Board in a cheap calculator

We had a cracked calculator in our pile.  In many cheap electronics a blob of epoxy replaces an individual black-box with metal leads soldered on top of the board.  This is known as Chip-On-Board, Blob-top or Direct Chip Attachment. The process can be cost effective if a manufacturer thinks they’ll be making 50k+ of an identical product. If you see this technique used in something expensive the choice may have been made to protect the chip (marginally) from reverse engineering.

Little keyboard

Little calculator keyboard

The little keypad of the calculator reminded me of a paper tape calculator take apart I did in 2010. I took the time to trace out all the keys.

The trigger switch is a spring

The trigger switch is a spring

From inside a light up bouncy ball, a reminder that a “switch” can be any two bits of metal that make and break contact. When the ball impacts the floor, the spring vibrates and triggers a subroutine in another Chip-On-Board integrated circuit on the reverse of this board.

Motor from a scanner spinning

Motor from a scanner spinning

One last kind of interesting bit to the day was stripping down the scanner part of the all-in-one printer/scanner whose printer part became the hopping bunny puppet. I made a GIF of motor spinning. I needed to use Photoshop to stabilize the video a bit and then export a GIF. The Flickr album holds more pictures of parts grabbed from the scanner, but Flickr still doesn’t host animated gifs.