Christmas has passed
and I was lucky enough to receive some new test gear and a couple other items
that will eventually find their way to this blog. It’s looking like 2012 will be
an exciting year on To the Rails. For this post I decided to put up some test
pictures from my new Cosview MV200UM digital microscope (featured in my Christmas Wish List). Check ‘em out.
This first picture
is a little calibration photo I took using my new Neiko Digital Calipers. The
software that comes with the Cosview microscope allows you to measure
distances/radii based on your photos. You have to run a little calibration to
begin with and enter your magnification scale manually in the process. 
This picture is a
close up (57x) of one of the random PCB solder practice boards I have lying
around my bench. The large metal squares are the connecting pads for surface
mount resistors/capacitors while the copper circles are vias that connect
signal traces between different layers on the PCB. Just about any PCB with any
level of sophistication has these all over the board.
Here is a shot of an
IC wafer I got from Electronics Goldmine some time ago. I am still trying to
figure out how to take decent pictures so this one didn’t turn out as well as I
was hoping, but you can make out the etched traces of each individual IC on the
wafer. We will go into IC manufacturing at some point in 2012.
Pretty standard
still frame of a populated PCB here. This is the sort of image I expect to take
a lot of going forward. I mainly wanted this microscope camera so that I can
check for solder bridges and short circuits so if I find anything interesting
or worth showing I will definitely post it. Eventually, I want to incorporate
some teardowns on this blog so I am hoping to master these circuit close ups.
In my last test
image you can see another IC die. This one is different from the first because
it zoomed in on the traces of a single IC rather than looking at wafer, which
contains many complete IC etchings. If you don’t know or don’t care to know
what any of that means then just stare at the pretty colors for awhile. The blue
dot in the center is a mark to indicate that the IC is defective in some way.
4 comments:
Those pictures are amazing.
You should submit them to an art gallery. I swear you would get in. I'll help you write a statement about how they view technology from a new angle, depicting the physicality of these machines which rule our lives, but whose inner workings are so poorly understood by the masses.
Nice pics! I'm trying to get a microscope working for these purposes also.
Nice blog. Thanks for sharing.
Digital Microscope
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