Gone to do Dublin to present work of great importance STOP
Back this evening STOP
Day visits to conferences are a silly idea STOP
Perseids meteor shower
I watched the meteor shower from the field at the Secret Nuclear Bunker where a group of us were camped doing radio stuff including bouncing signals off the ionized gas trail left by burned up meteors (meteor scatter).
I captured this time-lapse video which does include a few meteors as well as a pass by the ISS. The bright blob moving in from the left is the moon.
The circular trails are the stars moving across the sky around the pole star (not quite in frame)
A pretty visitor to the garden
A nice Garden Tiger (Artica caja) spotted this morning on the grass in the garden.
It’s a widespread moth, strikingly colored and patterned.
I’ve not seen the larval form on any of its likely food plants, so have no idea if there will be more appearing soon.
De-capping ICs for fun and profit, but mostly fun.
Some time back, a friend @codfishcatfish was building a GPS disciplined oscillator for radio measurements. Part of the circuit uses a MAX232 device to interface the low voltage digital signals to a PC serial port. He found his cheap (from eBay) MAX232s got very hot and failed in use.
It was obvious the devices were fake, so I offered to tear one down to see what it really was, a cheap clone or a re-badged something else?
The standard technique to remove all the epoxy and metal to leave the bare silicon die is to use strong nitric acid. So I cut the legs off the chips, no point wasting acid dissolving those, and ground away some of the epoxy resin to speed up the dissolution.
Soaking the ICs for an hour in room temperature nitric acid had no discernible effect, so I heated up the acid. The reaction became very vigorous!
It took about 20 minutes to remove sufficient epoxy to see the silicon die – it also removed the lead-frame and bond-wires so there was no chance to test the ICs after de-capping.
The ICs were dried and the die removed by scraping away the carbonised epoxy with a scalpel. This done, the die could be examined under high magnification to see if it looked anything like a real MAX232 or I could see any other identifying features.
Comparison with a real MAX232 die proves these ICs are fake. The only identification I could find on the die is the following
So I’m non the wiser as to who actually made these, but the device does seem to show a general resemblance to the layout of a real MAX232 – they didn’t just program a micro-controller to do the job or something similar.
It was just a fun diversion and a chance to try something I’d wanted to do for a while. I might try to find some more interesting ICs to pull apart and take better images of.
Another Mountain
Scafell Pike is the highest mountain in England. It’s only slightly taller than the surrounding peaks, but popular with walkers due to being the tallest.
You can hike to the top, no climbing gear is needed beyond good boots, though walking poles are a big help.
The approach to the top is across a loose bolder / scree field, you think you’re getting close to the summit, then the clouds clear momentarily (or someone with a map points out) you’re still a good half hour (across more loose scree) from the top. The point you’re been heading to is just a lower summit and conflux of several routes.
Having walked Scafell Pike twice now, I think I can safely say I don’t want to do it again. It’s no where near as much fun as Snowden or Ben Nevis.
Though the views are stunning when the clouds clear…
Perhaps I’ll climb it once more…
