When you work with tiny things on the regular, they start to seem normal-sized to your hands and eyes. Then, if you work with even smaller packages, stuff like 0603 might as well be through-hole components.
[alnwlsn] is no stranger to the small, having worked almost exclusively with surface mount components for a few years now. Even so, they’ve built up an admirable stock of DIP chips, including the ATtiny84 DIP-14 that their incredible Simon game is built into.
How in the world did [alnwlsn] accomplish this? As you’ll see in the video after the break, the answer lies in milling, but with the motors disconnected and manually turning the knobs.
Soldering didn’t require anything special, just the usual suspects like a fine-tipped iron, an X-acto knife, some tweezers, and a few other things like a hot air gun for soldering fine wires to the leadframe. Oh, and of course, really steady hands, and lots of patience.
The 2024 Tiny Games Contest officially closed on Tuesday, September 10th. We’ll have the results out as soon as possible. Best of luck to all who entered!
“As you’ll see in the video after the break, the answer lies in milling, but with the motors disconnected and manually turning the knobs”
That’s still milling lol
If anything, that’s the normal way milling is done.
that’s amazingly ridiculous but when i read the headline i had something even more ridiculous in my mind…somehow there was a battery hidden in the chip and the chip itself could be dropped into water and some bizarre electrostatic / electrodynamic / electrolytic effect would cause it to have non-zero propulsion. just a chip submarine, moving through still water under its own control.
imagination is fun i guess
It’s the Simon Effect currently being tested by the U.S. Navy.
Highly classified, I’m surprised that Hackaday had access to it.
Great to be featured on Hackaday once again! Sometimes, the contests on here are just the right amount of motivation. We’ve all got those ideas that would be fun but just can’t seem to find the time for. Thanks for getting me into action, even if that was at 1:30AM the night before the contest deadline.
So far, my favorite!
The workshop sounds like the intro to Back to the Future
I’m just one flux capacitor and Deloren short
This reminded me of this post from a while back, where the whole DIP package got hollowed out to insert a hidden microcontroller:
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/25/student-trolls-anti-arduino-prof-with-parasite-mcu/
Impressively, that one was done freehand with a rotary tool (although there was some carnage).
Gets my vote. 1. Because it’s Simon; awesome for seniors. 2. Because it’s so teeny-weeny!
So, the second reason cancels the first?
As a senior citizen, manipulating such tiny buttons and focusing on the tiny lights would be frustrating.
Surely this must be the winner. It’s physically tiny, on a Tiny, and a game. Well done!
That’s really amazing!
That’s a great tiny build! congratulations to the maker!
Very cool!
I was young. My eyes were GREAT!
But my supply of new old stock through-hole components was huge while my supply of hobby cash was small. So I resisted SMD.
Now I’m older.
There is so much great stuff available only as tiny SMD parts and it’s sooo cheap. Plus my hobby cash supply is much better than it ever was before.
But everything small is so F#@NG blurry now!
I hate getting old.
This has given me some ideas. I dunno why I hadn’t though of this before!
Which is to create DIL-14/16/whatever chips with my own PCB at the top, and “legs” as wires, so I can replace old broken chips, for example the RAM that always fails in my Battlezone.
Hell, I could even make my own 555’s!
+1 Panondorf but I can get pcbway* to populate my chips for me! Win-win!
* other pcb manufacturers are available….