Either in need of a coffee table or suffering a severe lack of upscaled electronics, [Darren] just finished up a great build for his living room. It’s a huge, scaled up version of a UV erasable EPROM with an infinity mirror in place of the fused quartz window.
[Darren]’s coffee table was inspired by an earlier build by the geniuses at Evil Mad Scientist. A few years ago, they built a 555 footstool that was scaled up about 30 times its normal size. Even at footstool scale, the 555 is still relatively tiny.
[Darren] is using a similar construction technique by forming the legs of the EPROM out of laminated plywood. Since this build is significantly larger, building the entire device out of solid, laminated plywood would result in an unwieldy and expensive piece of furniture. Instead, [Darren] constructed the legs and sides out of plywood laminations, covering the ends, top, and bottom with plywood panels. The result is a hollow EPROM/coffee table that’s still structurally sound.
If you’re a bit confused after counting the number of pins on the coffee table, you’re in good company. This is technically a scaled-up version of a 16-pin 0.600″ PDIP, something that a quick googling suggest isn’t historically accurate. Maybe there was an EPROM with a 4-bit wide data bus somewhere in the annals of electronics history, but we’re happy with saying that a completely accurate scaled-up ROM would be far too big for [Darren]’s living room.
via reddit
Great build, I never thought of a DIL chip shaped table and now I have visions of resistor shaped pillows complete with color stripes and 3-4 legged tea cup holders shaped as TO52 transistors.
http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/resistor-neck-pillow
I must learn to knit, NOW!
want-one-badly!
My conversation with my OH:
Me: Oh look at this
OH: No
Didn’t even have to ask :-D
I’m not even going to bother to show her, as the response is predictable enough!
It’s awesome, though. Love the footstool, too.
I’ve never seen a 16 pin windowed chip, but there were some 20 pin eraseable GALs
The 16-pin MC68HC705KJ1 erasable version (in cerdip) had a window. The vast majority of them were OTP pdips though (probably because they were a twentieth the price…)
They made them, the most common example that jumps to mind is the UV erase versions of the OTP PIC chips that were popular in the 1990s. Prototyping for a one time programmable chip would be hard without a good emulator, so many OTP microcontrollers had a UV erase version for development, typically in a ceramic package with a gold lid and window. I have a number of 8 pin PICs with windows floating around, and even a couple tiny SMD chips with round windows covering almost their entire surface.
The UV PICs were 8,14 or 18 pin – don’t think there were any 16 pin.
And for additional pedantry I think all the 8 and 14 pin ones were in gold side-brazed packages, not cerdips
Pedantic, surely not… next you’ll be telling me EPROMS didn’t have a real infinity mirrors in them… actually I suspect a gold sided brazed package might look pretty cool too. http://www.decadecounter.com/vta/pict14/at27c256r.jpg – arguably easier to make in to a table as well.
Somewhere I have some ancient 9X series DTL logic chips that look a little like this… http://www.p3oriontopsecret.com/uploads/5/5/3/4/5534571/8787897_orig.jpg
I toyed with the idea of making them in to jewelry at one stage, but abandoned the notion…. DTL cufflinks would have pretty high geek cred however.
The PIC12C508/JW (a eight-pin gold side-brazed PIC) is surprisingly pretty: http://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/ODAwWDgwMA==/z/Lp0AAOSwEK9Txd8C/$_57.JPG
555 footstool, check, eprom coffee table, check, next on the list giant LED lamp (6′ high LED).
I have the 18″ high thinkgeek table lamp, is that close enough?
Can’t wait for a big red panic button footstool.
Add a few to-220 chairs and maybe a bridge rectifier footstool… I feel a crowd funded geek furniture theme might be developing here… http://media.digikey.com/photos/Vishay%20Photos/D-34_PKG.jpg << Flip it over … its a foot stool.
If you scale that up to where the center hole is large enough for a patio umbrella, will it be large enough for a table or will the top be a foot thick?
someone drilled an infinitly deep hole in my eprom chip….
Here is a windowed 68hc705
http://lell.se/bilder/kretsar/xc68hc705k1cs.jpg
Now please someone make a giant Tek scope panel frame to put our flat TV into.
This is not the way I remembered it. We always had a piece of tape over the window after we programmed it.