Very nice job. You have more guts than I. When you drilled the wholes scared me. But then the huge saw; was deifying. And after all this you still have all the digits. Well Done.
Hahahah, I read these comments first and than i realy had to see this video... i wasn't dissapointed :-) I was like looking at a horror movie...especially in the end when you hear the girl singing trough the radio ... But in all... Very nice video !! Thumbs up.
Great video, thank you for it. I've been making things with the arduino boards. I always try to make things as small as i can. Ignore the comments about safety, i bet they can't mow the yard without wearing full body armor.
Great job - fine attention to detail.. patience of the Pope! Love the heat transfer method to the PC board! Most folks are not aware of "how things work" including the fact that laser printers actually "melt" the micro-dust powder "ink" onto the paper. You've simply "melted" it back off and onto the copper! Paper doesn't last long under water.. whilst the plastic "ink" remains impervious. Outstanding old-man! 73 - Norway Three Bravo Norway Quebec -
I was waiting to see the drill bit go into your finger! Maybe a little safety would be good when you are showing everyone in the world including kids how to make this. Other than that I love the video and project, very nice.
I used to build these as a "Cat's Cradle" boardless design back in my youth using the then smallest through pin miniature resistors. Range depended on the sensitivity and size of antenna employed on the receiver. At best on a 9 Volt PP3 powered bug range was 100 metres. Readability @ range = power available. Lots of fun and easy to make.
0605 Capacitator! Never come across one of those in my forty year career in electronics. A better way of building this is to hold the board down with a spot of blue-tak on the back, when soldering parts down, put a small blob of solder on only one of the device pads, heat the solder and then using tweezers slide one end of the device into the solder bead and let it cool. Once you've done that, solder the other end with a small amount of solder and a brief touch with the soldering iron. This will save you from burning yourself and apply less heat and less stress to the parts otherwise with small surface mount parts there is a danger of the metal end terminations coming away or with a capacitor the end cap will crack and give you an intermittant fault that is very hard to locate.
you can also get an electrically conductive pen, draw your circuit on paper then stick the components on the paper and a bit more pen to make the connections and job done, no burnt fingers
-So in order to build it i need to burn my fingers multiple times, cut them apart, drill into them and dissolve them in acid? -not if you work safely. -safely? How does that taste?
+Luca Morgenstern when i used to do this sorta stuff, i used to superglue the components on the board first so i didn't have to hold em while i soldered them, its only logical really
i've made a smaller one based on the same circuit but i used a smaller coil, var cap, and mic. everything was dead bug soldered (no pcb) while temporarily stuck to some aluminum tape for heat transfer. it was powered by a tiny ultracapacitor and cut solar cell. 10mm X 10mm X 5mm
Its Ferric Chloride , a material for etching copper clad boards. Ferric chloride has the advantage over other etching solutions like nitric acid by greatly improving the safety of etching. Ferric chloride is free from harmful gas emissions it will stain but will not burn skin.
Looked like a Talking Electronic's Schematic by Colin Mitchell in Melbourne Australia. A couple of suggestions: 1. You would do a lot better simply by placing the tinned PCB with components populated on a frying pan. Reflowing would evenly solder the components much neater. 2. Having a large CR2032 battery as base, you might as well make the board into 20mm diameter size. Doing this, you could etch the coil onto the board and tune just by using the variable capacitor.
your doctor must love you , drilling so close to your fingers and cutting with the blade , thanks , but i would rather buy it before attempting this type of class
You did a very good job. One more challenge is to use 0201 SMD components and SMD mic on double side pcb. Then, the size will become just 1/4 to 1/9 from the original.
Personally, I would have left the extra board space until after the parts were on. Would've left some room for gripping for assembly. Also: solder paste and a heat gun. Fully impressed with the manual soldering of 0808 components! My fingertips probably wouldn't have survived.
I think it's also possible to use a double sided pcb and just etch the coil on the board which also acts as the antenna, it would eliminate the use of the air coil and that long wire antenna. Just a suggestion you could try out
dazaro3 you have to take the transmission frequency wavelength into consideration. Anything less than a straight piece of wire will degrade the range even if the total length is the same that which is printed on the pcb.Anything else is a compromise.
Another question, why keep adding solder? He waaay over-tinned the board and could have used just that initial giant glob of solder to add the components with (as long as he added flux). Every time he reached for more solder I cringed a little.
+ThinkLearnSolve I have and it was much smaller then any of those he build. Mine could really be called worlds smallest, or at least youtubes smallest for sure. It could fit on top of the square flat face of a to-92 transistor that he uses for his build and it was actually a tad smaller then that surface as well.
It's possible to do SMD without a board. You cut 0.5mm copper sheet metal cut into the trace shapes and stick it to a upside down piece of duct tape. You then solder with a very fine point like a USB soldering iron, and peel it off the tape. The copper sheet pieces hold it together quite nicely. You can then seal it inside a think coat of black epoxy to hide the inner workings, waterproof it and make it impossible to disassemble. Though I didn't use the circuit in this video, I'v built something similar. Mine uses 27MHz also has a tiny slice of solar cell on top of the unit and a small flat supercap. It can run without batteries for quite a few hours in the dark. A thermistor frequency shifts a 1kHz astable sine generator which amplitude modulates the 27MHz transmission. It's essentially a throw it where you want temp sensor, but calibration gets a bit tricky to make the audio carrier's default tone exactly 32 degrees. 1 degree change causes a shift of 10Hz, +/- 5% tolerance. Each temperature bug used a signal tone 500Hz apart, and every 5 minutes a SMD 555 timer triggers a mosfet. The mosfet turns on the astable multivibrator oscillator and the transmission circuit for exactly 10 seconds and stops. This brings the current consumption to microamps in standby, as modern SMD 555 timers are rediculously low power. It was able to run most if not all of the night every day. All of them are dead now, due to water ingress and corrosion, as I hung them by the antenna in trees and such, the UV of the sun ate the resin off, and water killed the circuits. I used them for part of my project massively collecting weather data around the yard. I also made a few humidity sensing versions but those used a few 1*1in solar cells and were not too compact due to needing more complex circuitry. Needless to say a solar supercap powered audio bug is quite easy too. The mic can be connected with magnet wire and be routed where you want and the tiny black square stuck wherever sunlight is. Antenna is easy enough to hide as well. Trust me, when I was younger I made a HELL of a lot of wireless bugs from audio to temperature to humidity. Absolutely insane what you can make (and hide muhahahaah >:D) with SMD parts.
Dammit I can't find the schematics for my little temp bug. I was inspired to make a vid on it, but low and behold that sheet of paper is lost the the boxes and boxes of documents I have, and the original digital one is lost ot disk failure. Gonna have to recreate it then, thank god I made a version of the bug sealed in clear epoxy. It's in my junk box I'l see what I can do.
I like this video I can't wait to try the build-one question though or more of a thought I guess but have you seen the " conductive wire glue" that is available now? I was wondering if that would be easier to use. It would take over night to dry but one could lay the glue down have plenty of time to place the parts, might make it a bit easier as well as a cleaner build . What are your thoughts on this keep the videos coming two thumbs up! btw- I have built a few of your TX's all have worked the first time on power up Thanks again
Impossible to say,double check all soldering work and make sure all parts in the right place.Try building one of my other transmitters they are a lot easier to build.
cool little thing you did there, back in the technical high school we're obsessed with building those, even made a 5km (pretty illegal i guess) range one. We didn't have any use for those though...but it was interesting. thanks for the upload:)
I had a 5W one made a few years back... It covered the whole town. I played techno mixes on it 24/7. Never got in trouble for it though. I switched it off when i bought my first mp3 player so when i was riding my bike i was listening music from it, and not from the radio station i built. I used a good qualiy souncard for my computer which was hacked with a small program to mux the left and right channel in to the 38KHz stereo carier. It worked fantastic!
I think some proper advice would be to drill this before you cut it which would leave more leverage to hold the board with less danger to your fingers. Also you may want to consider leaving about one millimeter between the edge of the board and the outermost traces as there is less chance of them lifting off the board that way.
They can be very hard to get working when you first start building them You need a cheap frequency counter from Ebay .its a GY560 only cost £13 They help very much indeed ,will let you know if its working and if its working within the FM radio band 88-108Mhz.
Well biggest problem is the coin cells are much larger not to mention you'd probably have to have a receiver close by. Real spies probably have smaller stuff from factories. Easier actually to make a micro flash recorder instead.
Also, hint: don't tin you board first. Use a miniscule drop of glue (use screwdriver for dosing) to stick the SMD components to the non conductive parts of the board, the just solder them as usual. It will make your board look less fucked up and it will save your fingers from burning.
nice. I liked the video overall but some better lighting would be nice. just an idea for future use, soldering paste and a toaster oven would make for allot cleaner soldiering job.
Greetings from Bucks Dazaro Beautifully designed and minimised. The video was great, and I wish you add some safety advice to it, especially about using cutting tools, because there are many students out there who would use your video for their projects. Cheers mate!
Yes ,to convert to SMD is very easy ,like you say just use the same value of components.See my video where i build a SMD transmitter,they are easy and faster to build.
NSA bug is smaller and simpler its only a transistor, microphone, and an antenna. It has no battery and is energized by a powerful radio transmission. It is akin to Rfids but with a microphone attached. Google NSA ANT catalog for the source.
I bought one like yours kinda of mine 50 % bigger,with a lot of smd parts on it ,haven't tried it yet,I don't have a freq.counter,so when I do it will be trail and error to find my place on the radio.plus I wanted to mount a small l e d ,so I no when mine is turned on.,mine is run on 9 volts.but I love how well yours,worked ,good job.,if you ever make a kit love to buy it..,anyone no how to make a l e d work on nine volts,I don't no what size resistor I need to get down to 3 volts.
