I do like a good eclipse, but not enough to be awake at 3am to photograph it. So, I set up a camera to take one picture every 30 seconds, pointed it roughly where I expected the moon to be at the time of maximum eclipse and set it recording.
Stacking the images with StarStaX produced this rather different view of the eclipse.
Time lapse stacked images of the Lunar eclipse of September 2015
Using the same photographs I produced a video of the eclipse too. It starts dark until the moon moves into shot, then the moon fades out nicely, you can see the shadow of the Earth moving down the face of the moon, and then the moon reappearing.
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 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.
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?
A couple of sacrificial fake ICs
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.
ICs with legs and some of the epoxy package removed
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.
Cruddy mess after the acid finishes its work
After the acid had done its work the bare die was visible in both ICs
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.
Bare die of fake MAX232
Comparison with a real MAX232 die proves these ICs are fake. The only identification I could find on the die is the following
Identification marks
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.
