Around March of 2014, out of the blue, SparkFun started selling these beauties.

Those are 4-digit 7-segment LED displays in a DIP6 package. Tinkerers and enthusiasts everywhere let out a collective shriek of delight, throwing fistfuls of money at SparkFun, depleting their initial stock in less than half an hour. One early commenter summed up the feeling perfectly: “No idea what I’ll use it for, but don’t care: shut up and take my money!”

After a couple of weeks, I was finally able to buy some for myself.

My first official project incorporating this component is what I’ve been calling the Bubble Clock Watch. It draws inspiration from SparkFun’s BigTime Watch kit, but it is meant to be smaller, and is based around the surface-mount TSSOP MSP430 instead of the through-hole DIP Atmega328.

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A few years ago, I decided to try my hand at using SMD components for building circuits. I bought a cheap heat gun and some tweezers and set to work harvesting whatever parts I could melt off old PC circuit boards. Pretty soon, I realized that I needed a place to store all the little bits I had been liberating, as storing them scattered like grit across my workbench wouldn’t do. Continue reading →

A few months ago, my brother gave me his old Nikon D40 digital SLR camera.  Through the wear and tear of taking 70,000 pictures over six years, the shutter mechanics had worn down just enough that the shutter would jam after less than ten shots.  After unsuccessfully trying to fix it, my brother had replaced the body with a newer model.  I was now the lucky recipient of the old camera body, along with the kit lens that originally shipped with it.

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During my adventures 15-20 years ago in taking apart old computers, I happened to discover that the BIOS chips were removable.  They all had stickers covering the top, and I discovered by feel that on most of the chips there was a slight indentation underneath the sticker.  On removing the sticker, I found to my delight a clear glass (actually fused quartz) window through which I could see the silicon chip.

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