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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.