Day: July 31, 2015

Hacker Creates Thermal Probes By Welding With A PC Power Supply

July 31, 2015 by 35 Comments

[Illya Tsemenko] decided to build his own thermocouples from bare wire. [Illya] is interested in measuring the temperature of Liquid Nitrogen and for this he needed T-type probes. While you can buy these for about 20 bucks, he felt this was too expensive for what is essentially two pieces of wire and decided to build his own.

Thermocouples use the Seebeck effect, when a piece of metal is hot at one end, and cold at the other the electrons in the hot end will be more energetic and migrate towards the cold end, creating a voltage. While this migration occurs in single metal, it can’t easily be measured (as the voltage will be the same as the measurement point). For that reason thermocouples use two metals in which the migration occurs at different rates. This difference creates an overall migration in one direction, and a voltage can be measured which correlates to the temperature where the metals meet. Thermocouples are extremely common and have many applications.

In order to make his thermocouples [Illya] needed to weld the two metals together, and knocked together a quick welding rig using a PC power supply and graphite electrode from a powertool. The graphite electrode is important as it prevents oxidization during the welding process.

The process worked well, and [Illya] was able to make both K and T-type thermocouples and successfully measure temperatures down to -190 degrees C. Awesome work [Illya]!

Learning From Transparent Microchips

July 31, 2015 by 24 Comments

Microchips and integrated circuits are usually treated as black boxes; a signal goes in, and a signal goes out, and everything between those two events can be predicted and accurately modeled from a datasheet. Of course, the reality is much more complex, as any picture of a decapped IC will tell you.

[Jim Conner] got his hands on a set of four ‘teaching’ microchips made by Motorola in 1992 that elucidates the complexities of integrated circuitry perfectly: instead of being clad in opaque epoxy, these chips are encased in transparent plastic.

The four transparent chips are beautiful works of engineering art, with the chip carriers, the bond wires, and the tiny square of silicon all visible to the naked eye. The educational set covers everything from resistors, n-channel and p-channel MOSFETS, diodes, and a ring oscillator circuit.

[Jim] has the chips and the datasheets, but doesn’t have the teaching materials and lab books that also came as a kit. In lieu of proper pedagogical technique, [Jim] ended up doing what any of us would: looking at it with a microscope and poking it with a multimeter and oscilloscope.

While the video below only goes over the first chip packed full of resistors, there are some interesting tidbits. One of the last experiments for this chip includes a hall effect sensor, in this case just a large, square resistor with multiple contacts around the perimeter. When a magnetic field is applied, some of the electrons are deflected, and with a careful experimental setup this magnetic field can be detected on an oscilloscope.

[Jim]’s video is a wonderful introduction to the black box of integrated circuits, but the existence of clear ICs leaves us wondering why these aren’t being made now. It’s too much to ask for Motorola to do a new run of these extremely educational chips, but why these chips are relegated to a closet in an engineering lab or the rare eBay auction is anyone’s guess.