Russian Decapping Madness

It all started off innocently enough. [mretro] was curious about what was inside a sealed metal box, took a hacksaw to it and posted photographs up on the Interwebs. Over one hundred forum pages and several years later, the thread called (at least in Google Translate) “dissecting room” continues to amaze.

h_1466184174_4168461_2f4afb42b7If you like die shots, decaps, or teardowns of oddball Russian parts, this is like drinking from a firehose. You can of course translate the website, but it’s more fun to open it up in Russian and have a guess at what everything is before peeking. (Hint: don’t look at the part numbers. NE555 is apparently “NE555” in Russian.)

From a brief survey, a lot of these seem to be radio parts, and a lot of it is retro or obsolete. Forum user [lalka] seems to have opened up one of every possible Russian oscillator circuit. The website loads unfortunately slowly, at least where we are, but bear in mind that it’s got a lot of images. And if your fingers tire of clicking, note that the URL ends with the forum page number. It’d be a snap to web-scrape the whole darn thing overnight.

We love teardowns and chip shots, of old gear and of new. So when you think you’ve got a fake part, or if you need to gain access to stuff under that epoxy blob for whatever reason, no matter how embarrassing, bring along a camera and let us know!

Thanks [cfavreau] for the great tip!

37 thoughts on “Russian Decapping Madness

    1. Nothing much, just a flyback BS generator powering a 555 timer which pseudo randomly triggers the sleaze, womanizing, and corruption circuits. The greed circuit is wired directly to mains so its always on, and causing a lot of noise on the logic board.

    2. At first, he was hilarious, because, you know, The Republican party would never allow someone that deranged to become its nominee, right? Then, we started getting nervous…all the *other* candidates were dropping out, even the moderate ones.

      Now, it’s a fun week in Ohio, and we’ll see what comes out of it. Hope nobody gets hurt. I’m not in love with Hillary, but I’ll take “morally casual” over “psycopathic xenophobe” any day of the week.

    3. Actually if you ask a russian… They will tell you that Putin was a national joke when he was running… and then he got in.

      I have had several Russians tell me, “be very afraid if your Trump becomes your leader, he is almost identical to our Putin.”

      1. Well, I remember those days. And Putin was never a joke in the sense that Trump is a joke right now.

        Prior to year 2000, Russian media was relatively free and they made fun of all the Russian politicians, including Putin. But after Putin gained power, the most popular media outlets were increasingly forced to talk only good about him. One of the most notable examples of such censorship is “Kukly” (“Puppets”) TV show, which was very popular at the time…

        1. Is that true though? You can’t be more than twice president in a row, but I’m not sure you can’t later on become president again, and in the period in between be speaker of the house or vice president.

          And also Putin is constantly elected by the vast majority, with the second biggest party being the communist incidentally. In the US the president has less votes and way way less public approval.

  1. Looks like an alien life form :)
    There’s a legend, that every time a Soviet pilot defected with an advanced jet fighter to the West, the Americans were amazed by the mechanical engineering while being simultaneously surprised by the outdatedness of electronics used in those planes.

    1. Maybe, but at the time, such “outdated” technology could have delivered the weapon and got the pilot/crew away safely, being less affected by such things as EMP than a lot of western avionics at the time.

    2. Of course now I can’t find the youtube channel but there’s a French guy who tears down old Soviet stuff. They were amazing with the electro-mechanical, very robust and doing some quite complex things well into the 80s that the west were doing on silicon by that point. Super interesting stuff to a westerner to see… a lot of the tech (especially military) may never be seen.

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