During the process of cleaning a capillary used to feed and bond the wire onto the chips, I had a small intrusive thought... and it may have won...

I'm working on retrofitting a wire bonder with custom electronics as part of a small side project(yes, to also make them cheaper). I think it's neat how the electric flame-off(EFO) gold ball forming system works when viewed at high magnification. Here's a short video about it.

A little sneak peek of another project I'm working on. Can you guess what this is? :)

I got one of my high speed cameras to try filming an ozone generator's dielectric barrier discharge, but the camera wasn't sensitive enough. Can't put a high speed camera away without filming something, them's the rules, so have a can of brake cleaner spraying at 895fps instead.

Decided to try a little experiment - zooming in from 15x to 100,000x in smooth progression. The SEM isn't particularly well calibrated so the result is only ~30-40nm resolution, but I think it's still pretty neat. Working on making SEMs so affordable you could have one at home :) 🧪 HQ link in reply.

Tungsten & oxides deposit on the Wehnelt and anode of SEMs as filament evaporate and gunk in the chamber hits it. Abrasives are used, but I found an alternative: 1:1 solution of 10% ammonia to 3% H2O2! If aluminium is present, oxides grow and a 5% phosphoric wash is needed after. 🧪

Tinkering with electron optics simulation this evening, came up with a little test software for boundary element method simulation and particle tracing. So far so good, and I think it has potential as an educational & low-complexity pro design tool. Would you want to use this? 🧪

Neat paper I missed in 2024 - these guys took an ultrasonic wedge wire bonder - the kind that's used to attach wires to chips - scaled it up by 15x, and used it to 3D print aluminium! Pretty cheap to implement, not much to it. Pretty cool. Open access, DOI: 10.3390/ma17102188 🧪

One of the more unusual workplaces for an engineer to be. Plugging something you designed and built into an obsolete avionics system that would cost more than your entire net worth to replace is... one of the feelings of all time, for sure. The jet is a Cessna Citation Bravo.

Built a small optical coordinate measurement machine and wrote a basic but mostly feature-complete software for it. Telecentric optics, so no perspective error. Resolution ended up at ~4µm for this ~30mm FOV. Would you want a nicer version of this(housing, lights) for ~2.5k? 🧪

Sipeed sent me their new SLogic16U3 USB3 logic analyzer to review(free, no obligation). Inside is just a tiny Gowin GW5AT-LV15 FPGA doing softcore USB3(!!!), which is how they made it so cheap. 800MHz@4ch is quite impressive. My verdict? Definitely going in the tool box. 🧪

Have you ever wanted to see a 90 second abridged explanation of how diode lasers work? Here it is. I took some pictures of a laser under my SEM, and it kind of just scope crept into a whole video. Not perfectly accurate, but it's hard to squeeze 100 books of info into 90 seconds.

Ever wondered how infrared thermometers work? By connecting over 100 thermocouples in series, all on a MEMS chip, floating in a vacuum! The cold side is connected to the base, thermal radiation is focused onto the hot side, and the Seebeck effect gives us a proportional voltage. 🧪

First handheld laser welds, cuts, some cleaning. What the internet says is true this time - compared to regular welding(MMA/MIG), this is, no exaggeration, a point&click tool. 10 minute learning curve. Some nuances like penetration and fillet size, but overall just spectacular.

Design, reality. Looks pretty accurate :) High speed imaging will be affordable, and hopefully soon.

I've made a big step and finally touched an FPGA on a personal level. Fighting the development environment was 90% of the effort and only 10% was learning how this whole HDL/constraint thing works. Now to draw the rest of the owl. In my case, a high-speed camera shaped one.

Who needs Boston Dynamics and Unitree when you can have Soviet Dynamics? This 45 YEAR OLD(!) film shows the exact thing techbros have been parading around for the past few years. LIDAR, SLAM, multi-core mainframes, live trajectory and path planning, IK, simulation, all from 1980 youtu.be/_klAzHoI7S0

WalkingMachinesNIITransmash1980

YouTube video by Spirit

youtu.be

Did I *need* to create an extremely detailed 3D model of an image sensor, down to the bond wires, overlaid sensor structure and modeled pads, just to put it on a PCB design? No. But did I spend quality CAD time doing that and then rendering it out for fun? Absolutely.

Some incredibly cool pre-production silicon just showed up in the mail: >2K resolution at >600 frames per second, >10kfps with windowing, global shutter, HDR. This may be the first image sensor to make high speed cameras truly affordable for *everyone*.

Do we have anyone with contacts at Xilinx/AMD? I want to get some samples of the new Spartan UltraScale+ chips. Specifically XCSU65P in CMVB529. And ideally a dev/evaluation board(SU65P or higher, need PCIe). My DMs are open, email works too - see my site.

Got some 1.5kW and 2kW air cooled laser welder+cutter systems in to try a distribution model(EU & US). Very clean builds inside - DC PSU, nameless laser source, OEM control panel, minor gas handling. Simple, but affordable and effective. Also going to mod cleaning mode into it ;)

Helped with a bit of repairs on a Mooney M20M(Bravo) recently, then went up in it! General aviation is really fun, and if you ever get the chance to go flying, you should definitely say yes!

Anyone out there with access to a research fab at reasonable rates? I want to test a relatively simple and potentially groundbreaking semiconductor device, but with a very exotic stackup. I need ALD, PECVD, and likely DRIE. Low res maskless litho is fine. Preferably in the EU.

Is there any commercial interest in a desktop-ish full-cycle PCB "printer"? I proved out all the processes for fully automated, mostly chemical-free production of 2-layer PCBs with trace/space/via as small as 75μm. It could be relatively affordable, but not quite hobbyist-priced.

Ever wondered what TIG welding with neon gas would be like? No? Anyway, here's TIG welding with pure neon instead of argon. Video from Zerg Labs' archive.

Got this very neat radiometric 640x512 thermal imaging core. Miniaturization is wonderful, it's just the WLVP image sensor directly wire bonded onto the board, with an ASIC on the back to crunch data. There are no affordable phone dongles with this resolution, so I'll make one.

Silly computer peripheral idea: would you want an ultra-lightweight(world's lightest?), completely battery-free, permanently wireless 8kHz polling rate mouse, if it was confined to a special powered mousepad(~0.6mm thick, goes under your actual mousepad)?

Is it safe to clean ball bearings in an ultrasonic cleaner? Turns out, it isn't! I investigate this with a scanning electron microscope in this video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g6g... 🧪

Does ultrasonic cleaning damage ball bearings? Electron microscope investigation!

YouTube video by Spirit

youtube.com

Someone asked whether it's possible to build a DIY backscattered electron detector for a SEM. Yes, it's pretty easy! You just need bare PIN photodiodes, a trаnsimpedance amplifier, and a signal input. S=SED, R=BSED. Sample: rock section, ~nm of Au on top. Some charging visible.

Here's a soviet K573RF2 EPROM under the newly repaired SEM.