It happens to the best of designers, spending untold amounts of time designing a complex device just to find out that you missed a trace, or you couldn’t rout something to something else. As time marches on its becoming a bit less common to pop open a commercially produced device and see a little jumper wire or 2 flying across a pcb, or a resistor straddling an IC.
But when [Ilektron] opened up a Yamaha Dolby Pro Logic receiver to scavenge for parts he saw a very big “oops” and a even wilder fix. The maker took a pair of relays, flipped them “belly up” and hot glued them into place on top of a pair of ICs. Then the mess was “dead bug” wired to the circuit using insulated and uninsulated bus wire, contacts were then reinforced / insulated using more hot glue.
This is one of the most hacky fix we have seen in a commercially produced product, but we would love to hear your amusing horror stories of “WTH did they do?” So join us in the comments after the break.
Okay, we think it’s questionable when people say they have no problem soldering QFN packages, but BGA? Granted this chip has far fewer balls on it than many, but it’s still quite impressive that [Xevel] was able to solder this BGA breakout by hand.
The chip you see above is a TMP006 infrared temperature sensor from TI. [Xevel] picked up the part but didn’t want to break the bank when prototyping by buying a proper PCB to host it. There are only eight conductors on it, arranged in a grid with 0.5mm pitch. That didn’t seem to scare him off, as the video after the break shows him connecting each to a conductor on a hunk of stripboard.
[Xevel] mentions that this is a dead-bug style project. Usually you glue the part upside down when using that technique, but it needs line of sight to get an accurate temperature reading so he first cut a hole in the substrate. We’d bet he’s using wire-wrapping wire to make the connections. It’s a very fine solid core wire which is perfect for this kind of work.
Building a circuit Manhattan style with small bits of copper and solder is a skill all its own, and building a prototype dead bug style is close to a black art. [Anderson] is taking it to the next level with his volumetric circuits. Not only is he building a free-form circuit that’s also a one-bit ALU, he’s also designing software to make these sort of circuits easy to design and build.
[Anderson] is calling his 3D circuit design software Pyrite, and it does exactly what it says on the tin: creates three-dimensional, grid-aligned physical circuits. Automating the construction of a circuit is not a trivial task, and soldering all these components together even more so.
With the first prototype of his software, [Anderson] entered the schematic of a simple one bit ALU. The resulting layout was then carefully pieced together with solder and hot glue. It didn’t work, but that’s only because the schematic was wrong. Designing the software is still an incredible accomplishment, and now that [Anderson] has a rudimentary system of automatically designing free form and dead bug circuits, there are a lot of interesting possibilities. Ever wonder if the point to point wiring found in old radios was the most efficient layout? [Anderson] could probably tell you.
You can check out a few videos of [Anderson]‘s work below.
So you think you’re pretty good at soldering really tiny parts onto a PCB? You’re probably not as good as [Shibata] who made a GPS/GLONASS and Geiger counter mashup deadbug-style with tiny 0402-sized parts.
The device uses an extremely small GPS/GLONASS receiver, an AVR ATxmega128D3 microcontroller, a standard Nokia phone display and an interesting Geiger tube with a mica window to track its location and the current level of radiation. The idea behind this project isn’t really that remarkable; the astonishing thing is the way this project is put together. It’s held together with either skill or prayer, with tiny bits of magnet wire replacing what would normally be PCB traces, and individual components making up the entire circuit.
While there isn’t much detail on what’s actually going on in this mess of solder, hot glue, and wire, the circuit is certainly interesting. Somehow, [Shibata] is generating the high voltage for the Geiger tube and has come up with a really great way of displaying all the relevant information on the display. It’s a great project that approaches masterpiece territory with some crazy soldering skills.
We don’t all need super high quality electronic testing gear. Sometimes second-hand or inexpensive equipment is accurate enough to get the job done. Though it can be a bit annoying to miss out on some of those “luxury” features. [Ekriirke] had this problem with his cheap multimeter. He wished the LCD screen had a backlight for easier visibility, so rather than upgrade to a more expensive unit he just added one himself.
After opening up the multimeter [Ekriirke] found that it ran on a single 12V battery. He realized that the simplest thing to do would be to wire up four white LEDs in series. The four LEDs were arranged within the case off to each side of the LCD, one in each corner. The leads were bent at 90 degree angles and soldered together “dead bug” style. Thin strips of copper foil tape were attached to the PCB in such a way that the anode and cathode from the LEDs would make contact when the case was closed back up.
The tape wraps around to the other side of the PCB where there was more room for the next piece of the circuit. A capacitor, resistor, and transistor are used in conjunction with a momentary switch. This circuit allows [Ekriirke] to turn on the light for about ten seconds by pressing the button one time. The circuit also runs through the meter’s dial switch, preventing the LEDs from being turned on while the meter itself is turned off.
Back in the 1980s I was a budding electronics geek working in a TV repair shop. I spent most of my time lugging TVs to and from customers, but I did get a little bench time in. By then new TVs were entirely solid-state and built on single PC boards, but every once in a while we’d get an old-timer in with a classic hand-wired tube chassis. I recall turning them over, seeing all the caps and resistors soldered between terminal strips bolted to the aluminum chassis and wondering how it could all possibly work. It all looked so chaotic and unkempt compared to the sleek traces and neat machine-inserted components on a spanking new 19″ Zenith with the System 3 chassis. In a word, the old chassis was just – ugly.
Looking back, I probably shouldn’t have been so judgmental. Despite the decades of progress in PCB design and the democratization of board production thanks to KiCad, OSH Park, and the like, it turns out there’s a lot to be said for ugly methods of circuit construction.
Ugly is Beautiful
Construction methods that differ from standard surface-mount and through-hole PCB technology vary, but a decent catch-all term for these methods is “Ugly construction”. Specifics vary, but it’s one of those “You’ll know it when you see it” things. For my money, ugly style is any electronic build technique where the components are not completely mechanically anchored to a substrate, like a clad or unclad board. With through-hole and SMT, we’re used to all the terminals of each component being soldered firmly to the board, making a solid mechanical and electrical connection. Ugly eschews this approach and lets the components all hang out.
Sometimes there’s no board at all in an ugly build and the components are just soldered to terminal strips or between input and output connectors. Such builds are not terribly sound mechanically, so they’re mostly reserved for quickie prototypes. When there is a board in an ugly build, it’s generally used solely as a ground plane with only the grounded leads of components soldered down. With ground established and some semblance of mechanical stability added, the other connections are made above the board. Component leads are tied directly together or with short lengths of jumper wire, and eventually the whole circuit starts to come together. Mechanical stability can be added to a joint by running a high-value resistor to ground.
Does Ugly work? You bet! One famous example from the ham radio world is the Ugly Weekender. Designed by Roger and Wes Hayward in 1981, the Ugly Weekender is a low-power (QRP) transmitter for the 40-meter band. Started as a father and son project over Christmas break, the Weekender accomplishes a lot with just a handful of parts tacked to a plain copper-clad board. And Ugly is fast. The “Weekender” part of the UW transmitter refers to the fact that it can be built in a weekend by any reasonably skilled ham with access to a well-stocked parts bin. With no PCB to design, no tedious phototransfer or manual masking process, and no etching, the build can begin right away. I think this is the largest intangible benefit of Ugly construction – it doesn’t interrupt the creative momentum. You get an idea, you start tacking parts down, and you just follow the flow of the design.
As you can imagine, Ugly works best for circuits that mostly use discrete components. After all, it’s got to be difficult to tack a 14-pin DIP down to a board, right? Enter the “Dead Bug” style of Ugly. As the name implies, Dead Bug builds have components with all the leads sticking up in the air like a dead bug. Sometimes the DIPs and other components are glued to the board for mechanical stability with a dab of superglue. The important point, though, is that interconnections still all occur above the board, and ground connections are short, direct and many. That huge ground plane is a key feature of Ugly, which is why it’s so often used for RF circuits.
Another benefit of Ugly is the reduction of stray capacitance. Solderless breadboards are great prototyping tools, but there’s no escaping the fact that a grid of long, parallel conductors spaced 0.1″ apart and separated by a dielectric is going to have capacitance. It’s not a lot, and it’s not a factor for every circuit, but a couple of picofarads here and there can add up to a problem. With short leads and no long parallel traces, Ugly minimizes stray capacitance and is another reason a lot of RF circuits use it.
Help for Ugly: Manhattan Style
Ugly only goes so far, though, and it’s not appropriate for every circuit. Ugly tends to be difficult to replicate – after all, when you solder four leads together in the air and support it with a 10-megohm resistor to ground, it’s a little difficult to document exactly what you did, and even a photograph doesn’t necessarily do it justice. So Ugly sometimes needs some help, and that’s where Manhattan style comes in.
Named after its resemblance to rows of high-rise buildings, Manhattan construction uses small pads punched out of copper-clad board and glued to the ground-plane board. Insulated from the ground-plane, the small copper pads serve as junctions for terminals – no more connections hanging out in mid-air, and no more support resistors. Pads can be punched out or created with a nibbling tool, or even created directly on the backplane board. ICs can be incorporated into Manhattan builds either with tiny pads or with a larger pad with lines scored in the copper by some careful work with a saw. Dead-bugging an IC in a Manhattan build is not out of the question, either.
You might be tempted to think that Manhattan is only useful for through-hole components, but not so fast. With a little ingenuity, even surface-mount components can find their way into Manhattan builds. Following [Paul Harden]’s (NA5N) guide to Manhattan, pads and strips created of the thinner 0.031″ thick copper clad board can be glued to a thicker backplane and used to create landing pads for surface-mount parts. As with any build using SMT, things can get a bit dicey, but with enough pre-planning and the proper tools, Manhattan-SMT can result in some pretty cool builds.
Ugly and Manhattan construction are clearly not suitable for every build, but knowing these techniques can open up some doors and make it a little easier to throw a circuit together. And as [Harry Lythall] (SM0VPO) points out, “The correct construction method is any one that works. The best construction method is the one that works best.” Maybe one of these methods will work best for your next project.
Featured image: [K8IQY]’s SW30+ 30-m CW transceiver. Source.
You think you’ve seen everything that there is to see regarding blinking LEDs and then a simple little trick proves you wrong. Our friend [Zach Fredin], aka [Zakqwy], added a pander mode to his blinky board which shows the Hackaday Jolly Wrencher in a Persistence of Vision mode. We love pandering, and obviously you just need to start the mode and wave the board back and forth. But in thinking the obvious you’d be wrong.
Badass deadbug soldering to “fix” a mirrored shift register footprint
In the video after the break [Zach] demonstrates all the features of the blinktronicator and it’s recently finalized firmware. The tiny little board is a USB dongle featuring two buttons and an arc of sixteen LEDs in a rainbow of colors. When we say tiny, we mean it. Those LEDs are 0402 components and the board was small enough (and interesting enough) to receive an honorable mention in the Square Inch Project.
You would think that soldering all those LEDs by hand would be the trick, but [Zach] pulled off a much more difficult feat. Look closely at the image here (or click to embiggen). The two shift register footprints on the prototype were mirrored. He deadbug soldered each of them using — get this — the individual strands from some 28 AWG stranded wire. You sir, get the hardcore hand soldering badge and then some.
Okay, we’ll stop beating around the bush. The ATtiny45 on this board isn’t connected to the USB data lines, they’re only for power. That means, at its heart this is purely a blinking LED project, albeit one that uses the huge range of colors of the PICOLED family of parts. [Zach] did well with just two user inputs, but it’s the very simple POV party trick that really sucked us in. Instead of waving the board around, [Zach] uses a metal offset spatula as a mirror. Moving it back and forth unfolds the carefully timed flashes to draw your message in the air. Such a simple concept, but so satisfying to see it applied in a slightly different way.
[Andy_Fuentes22] likes to stream music, but is (understandably) underwhelmed by the sound that comes out of his phone. He wanted to build something that not only looks good, but sounds good. Something that could stream music through a Chromecast or a Raspi, but also take auxiliary input. Something awesome, like the Junkbots Sound System.
The ‘bots, named LR-E (Larry) and R8-CHL (Rachel), aren’t just cool pieces of art. They’re both dead-bug-walking bots with an LM386-based amplifier circuit and an AN6884-based VU meter in their transparent, industrial relay bodies. LR-E is the left channel, and his lovely wife is the right channel. The best part is that they are wired into the circuit through their 3.5mm plug legs and the corresponding jacks mounted in the Altoids tin base.
[Andy] built this labor of love from the ground up. He started with some very nice design sketches and took a bazillion pictures along the way. We think it sounds pretty good, but you can judge for yourself after the break. If VU meters are your jam, here’s another that’s built into the speaker.
Logic probes are simple but handy tools that can be had for a couple of bucks. They may not be the sexiest pieces of test gear, nor the most versatile, but they have their place, and building your own logic probe is a great way to understand the tool’s strength and weaknesses.
[Jxnblk]’s take on the logic probe is based on a circuit by [Tony van Roon]. The design hearkens back to a simpler time and is based on components that would have been easy to pick up at any Radio Shack once upon a time. The logic section is centered on the venerable 7400 quad 2-input NAND gate in the classic 14-pin DIP format. The gates light separate LEDs for high and low logic levels, and a 555 timer chip in a one-shot configuration acts as a pulse stretcher to catch transients. The DIP packages lend themselves to quick and dirty “dead bug” construction, and the whole thing fits nicely into a discarded marking pen.
It’s a simple build and a nice form factor for a useful tool, but for an even slimmer package like an old syringe you’ll probably have to go with SMD components. And when you graduate from the simple logic probe, you might want to check out the capabilities of this smart probe.
[Andrew Moser]’s clock is clearly a case of aesthetic by anesthetic — he built it after surgery while under the influence of painkillers. That may explain the questionable judgment, but we won’t argue with the look. The boost converter for the Nixie lives near the base of the bent wire frame, with the ATmega 328 and DS1307 RTC supported in the midsection by the leads of attached passive components and jumper wires. A ring at the top of the frame supports the octal socket for the Nixie and a crown of driver transistors for each element.
In the video after the break, [Andrew] speaks of rebuilding this on a PCB. While we’ve seen single tube Nixie PCB clocks before, and we agree that the design needs to be safer, we wouldn’t ditch the dead bug style at all. Maybe just throw the whole thing in a glass bell jar or acrylic tube.
Pong may not be much anymore, but it’s the granddaddy of all video games, and there’s still a lot to learn by studying its guts. And what better way to do that than by having it all laid out before you as you play? All it takes is 200 discrete transistors and two large handfuls of passives tacked to a piece of copper clad board to get a version of Pong executed without a single chip that’s playable on an oscilloscope.
Clearly a labor of love, if not an act of temporary insanity, [GK]’s realization of Pong is a sight to behold. Every scrap of it is circuits of his own design, executed dead bug style, apparently because [GK] enjoys life on hard mode. The game itself is surprisingly playable and you can even play against the machine. The video below is a little hard to watch, what with some glare on the oscilloscope CRT, but we’ll cut [GK] plenty of slack on this one; after all, it looks like this whole project was pulled off in one marathon weekend build session.
We’re still busy poring over the hand-drawn Forrest Mims-style schematics, which by themselves are almost a complete course in analog design. A lot of the circuits remind us [GK]’s bouncing ball simulation, which we covered a while back.
How creative are you when you make your circuit boards? Do you hunt around for different materials to use for the board? As long as it’s an insulator and can handle the heat of a soldering iron, then anything’s fair game. Or do you use a board at all? Let’s explore some options, both old favorites and some you may not have seen before, and see if we can get our creative juices flowing.
Transparent Circuit Boards
Let’s start with the desire to show more circuit and less board. For that we can start with [CNLohr]’s circuits on glass, usually microscope slides. What’s especially nice about his is that he provides detailed videos of the whole process, including all the failed things he tried along the way. Since he didn’t start with copper clad board, he instead glued his copper sheet to the glass using Loctite 3301. That was followed by the usual etching process, though with plenty of gotchas along the way.
In the end, he made a number of circuits, including an LED clock with the LEDs on the glass itself, and even attempted leading the community in making a glass keytar. The latter didn’t work out, but the resulting glass circuits are a work of art anyway.
What about making a transparent circuit board out of acrylic? [Frank Zhao] attempted just that by laser cutting troughs into the acrylic for the traces, and then drawing in nickel ink. But something in the ink ate into the acrylic, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, the voltage drop across the nickel was too high for his circuit. Suggestions were made in the comments for how to solve these problems, but unless we missed it, we haven’t seen another attempt yet.
But we’ve only just begun. What if you wanted even more transparency?
Circuit Boards In Air
One way to get more transparent than glass or acrylic is to do away with the board altogether. Historically this is called point-to-point construction, a term which predates printed circuit boards. The name for it we see more often here on Hackaday is a Dead Bug circuit, a name that comes from the appearance you get when you install a component upside down and solder to its legs.
[matseng] was bored one afternoon and made a Dead Bug version of the Little Wire circuit, an AVR programmer with a minimal parts count. After an hour or two using a fine tipped soldering iron, 0.4 mm solder and a stereo microscope he came up with the very elegant wire and parts only circuit shown here. The dead bug is the SOIC version of an ATtiny85.
However, these types of circuit don’t all look like dead bugs. Some far from it. Among the most spectacular has to be [Gislain Benoit]’s circular digital clock made up of thousands of components that keeps time using the North American 60 Hz mains voltage cycle.
Surprisingly not represented here on Hackaday, perhaps we missed it back around 2009, is the boardless artistic circuitry of [Peter Vogel]. These actually work too. Some monitor light levels and respond with
changing sounds, some light up, and some have rotating propellers.
Pyrite volumetric circuits software
[Anderson] has done a lot of work towards taking dead bugging to the next level, referring to these as volumetric circuits. He’s written software, called Pyrite, for designing them. It lets you draw the normal 2D version, then test it in a simulator, and then it folds the circuit into a 3D version for you to use as a guide. He’s also done some R&D into 3D connectors for prototyping.
Encapsulated Dead Bug Circuit
Crystal cMoy headphone amplifier
Then there’s the combination of transparent board and Dead Bug circuit. A perfect example of that is [Rupert Hirst]’s beautiful headphone amplifier circuit encapsulated in crystal clear resin. If you’ve worked with casting this much resin at once then you’ll know that it can potentially reach high temperatures as the resin cures. In this case temperatures reached a nail-biting 108°C while the capacitors were rated for 125°C. There was also the danger of resin leaking into the jack cases. To prevent that, [Rupert] first hardened a little resin around wherever leaks could occur. The result was a functioning amp and a work of art.
Circuits On 3D Surfaces
Next up is putting your circuit on boards that are far from board-shaped. [FESTO]’s bionicANTs ant army is one such example. The boards are 3D printed ant bodies. The circuit is applied using 3D MID, a process where the body is printed in a special non-conductive material onto which a laser draws out the traces. That’s followed by dipping the body in various baths to apply copper, nickel and gold layers.
The only other example our searches turned up of circuits involving mostly basic components being applied to 3D printed objects was a research project called SurfCuit. This one included software similar to the one [Anderson] worked on for Dead Bug circuits. The software allows you to drape a 2D circuit onto a 3D model. It then adds channels and holes to the model as needed. Once 3D printed, you then apply the actual wires and components to those channels and holes.
As we said, we had trouble finding these. If you’re aware of any more circuits on 3D printed objects, please share them in the comments below.
Circuits On Clothes
That brings us to circuits on clothing. In this case the wiring is often conductive thread, woven into the cloth itself. Of course it’s faster to do this by machine and we’ve seen a version of this from Cynthia Design Studio that lays down the three parallel traces you need to run WS2812 LEDs.
Conductive thread used in fabrics then connects components sewn onto the cloth. Most often this technique is used to add LEDs, as [Martijn] did with his climbing jacket. There, the LEDs change color based on the altitude as determined by a barometric sensor and other components. But there are other uses too. One such is [Afrdt]’s EMF wave detecting dress that plays back the signals using a vibrating motor, and as sound to earbuds that can be plugged into a collar.
Closing The Circuit
In this article we’ve been highlighting the artistic, the creative, and even the jaw droppingly beautiful. But this sort of circuitry can go the other way too, as our [Dan Maloney] points out in his article about getting ugly with circuits.
In any case, hopefully that’s gotten your creative juices flowing for your next circuit. Naturally we couldn’t fit every sample of awesomeness into one article, so let us know of any others that you particularly fancy, or better yet, that you’ve made yourself!
If this one seems familiar, it’s because we were dazzled by its first incarnation last year. As impressive as version 1.0 was, all the more so since it was built using the Manhattan method and seemingly over the course of a weekend, it did have its limitations. [GK] has been refining his design ever since and keeping accurate track of the process, to the tune of 22 pages on the EEVblog forum. We haven’t pored through it all yet, but the state of the project now is certainly worth a look. The original X-Y output to an oscilloscope was swapped out to composite video for a monitor, in both mono and color. This version also allows two people to play head-to-head instead of just battling the machine. It looks like [GK] had to add a couple of blocks worth of real estate to his Manhattan board to accommodate the changes, and he tidied the wiring significantly while he was at it.
It’s a project that keeps on giving, so feast your eyes and learn. We suspect [GK] doesn’t have any plans to finish this soon, but if he does, we can’t wait to see what’s next.
Thanks to [David Gustafik] for reminding us to check back on this one.
Some projects end up being more objet d’art than objet d’utile, and we’re fine with that — hacks can be beautiful too. Some hacks manage both, though, like this study in silicon and gallium under glass that serves as a bright and beautiful desk lamp.
There’s no accounting for taste, of course, but we really like the way [commanderkull]’s LED filament lamp turned out, and it’s obvious that a fair amount of work went into it. Five COB filament strips were suspended from a lacy frame made of wire, which also supports the custom boost converter needed to raise the 12-volt input to the 60 volts needed by the filaments. The boost converter is based on the venerable 555 timer chip, which sits in the middle of the frame suspended by its splayed-out legs and support components. The wooden base sports a few big electrolytics and some hand-wound toroidal inductors, as well as the pot for adjusting the lamp’s brightness. The whole thing sits under a glass bell jar, which catches the light from the filaments and plays with it in a most appealing way.
[Dr. Cockroach] has delighted us again with another of his circuits on cardboard. He calls it steampunk inspired, and while we guess we can see what he’s getting at, it’s more like a sweet example of artful dead bug construction. He calls it the ColorChord. Point its photo cells at a color and it’ll play a tone or a combination of tones specific to that color.
Three 555-centric boards use thumbtacks as connection points which he solders to, the same technique he used for his cardboard computer. They provide simple tones for red, green, and blue and a mix for any other color. However, he found that the tones weren’t distinguishable enough for similar colors like a bright sun yellow and a reddish yellow. So he ended up pulsing them using master oscillator, master-slave flip-flop, and sequencer circuits, all done dead bug style.
We’re not sure how practical it is but the various pulsed tones remind us of the B space movies of the 1950s and 60s. And as for the look of it, well it’s just plain fun to look at. Hear and see it for yourself in the video below.
This Bluetooth speaker is full of delightful surprises. The outer shell is an antique radio cabinet, but its practically empty interior is a combination of Dead Bug circuitry and modern BT receiver.
[PJ Allen] found the BT receiver on Groupon and decided to whip up amplifier and threshold detector circuits using only parts he already had in order to make this vintage-looking Bluetooth speaker. The cabinet is from a Silvertone Model 1955 circa 1936. Don’t worry, no antiques were harmed in the making of this hack, the cabinet was empty when he bought it.
LM4871 based amplifiers
The amplifiers, one per speaker, began life as a circuit from TI’s LM4871 datasheet. Some of the departures came about because he didn’t have the exact component values, even paralleling capacitors to get in the right range. The finished board is a delightful mix of “Dead Bug” and quasi-Manhattan style construction, “quasi” because he carved up the ground plane instead of laying pads on top of it.
Look at the front of the cabinet and you’ll see a rectangular display. Watch the video below and you’ll see that it throbs in time to the music. To do that he came up with a threshold detector circuit which started out based on a circuit from a Sharp/Optonica cassette tape deck, but to which he made improvements.
A running joke we see in the comments by Hackaday readers whenever a project includes an Arduino or Raspberry Pi that seems like overkill is to proclaim that “I could have done it with a 555 timer!” That’s especially the case if the project amounts to a blinking light or anything which oscillates. Well [Volos Projects] has made a whole robot out of a 555 timer circuit.
Okay, it’s really a dead bug circuit in the shape of a robot but it does have blinking lights. We also like how the base is the battery, though some unevenness under it seems to make the whole thing a bit unstable as you can see in the video below. There are also a few parts which are cosmetic only. But it’s cute, it’s a 555 timer circuit, and it’s shaped like a robot. That all makes it a win.
We do wonder how it can be taken further. After all, a walk cycle is a sort of oscillation so the 555 timer circuit could run some servo motors or at least some piezoelectric feet. Ideas anyone?
On the other hand, if you’re looking for a dead bug circuit which belongs in a fine arts museum then you need look no further than The Clock.
We’ve got a thing for projects that have no real practical value but instead seek to answer a simple yet fundamental question: I wonder if I can do that?This dead-bug style 555 blinky light is one of those projects, undertaken just to see how small a circuit can be. Pretty small, as it turns out, and we bet it can get even smaller.
[Danko]’s minimal circuit is about as small as possible for the DIP version of the venerable 555 chip. The BOM is stripped to the bone: just the chip, three resistors, a capacitor, and an LED. All the discrete components are SMDs in 0805. The chip’s leads are bent around the package to form connections, and the SMDs bridge those “traces” to complete the circuit. [Danko] shows the build in step-by-step detail in the video below. There’s some fairly fine work here, but we can’t help wondering just how far down the scale this could be pushed. We know someone’s made a smaller blinky using a tiny microcontroller, but we’d love to see this tried with the BGA version of the chip which is only 1.4 mm on a side.
Cheers to [Danko] for trying this out and having some fun with an old chip. He seems to have a bit of a thing for the 555; check out this cute robot sculpture that’s built around the chip.
Dead-bug circuit building is not a pretty affair, but hey, function over form. We usually make them because we don’t have a copper circuit board available or the duty of making one at home is not worth the efforts and chemical stains.
[Robert Melville and Alaina G. Levine] bring to light a compromise for high-frequency prototypes which uses the typical FR4 blank circuit board, but no etching chemicals. The problem with high-frequency radio is that building a circuit on a breadboard will not work because there is too much added inductance and capacitance from the wiring that will wreak havoc on the whole circuit. The solution is not new, build your radio module on a circuit board by constructing “lands” over a conductive ground plane, where components can be isolated on the same unetched board.
All right, sometimes dead-bug circuits capture an aesthetic all their own, especially when they look like this and they do allow for a darned small package for one-off designs.
Microcontroller demo boards such as the Arduino UNO are ubiquitous on Hackaday as the brains of many a project which inevitably does something impressive or unusual. Sometime someone builds a particularly tiny demo board, or an impressively large one. In the case of the board featured here, the Arduino is a gorgeous labor of love which can’t really be called a board since there is no PCB. Instead of the traditional fiberglass, [Jiří Praus] formed brass bars into the circuitry and held it together with solder.
This kind of dedication to a project leaves an impression. His notes show he saw the barest way to operate an ATMega328, built it, tested, and moved on to the power supply to make it self-sustaining, then onto the communication circuit, and finally the lights. The video below shows a fully-functional Arduino happily running the blink program. He plans to encase the brass portion in resin to toughen it up and presumably keep every bump from causing a short circuit. The components are in the same position due to a custom jig which means a standard shield will fit right into place.
