# realy cool chip



## glondor (Oct 10, 2010)

I found this today while scraping some stuff. Does any one know what it is? It is full of gold!
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## tlcarrig (Oct 10, 2010)

Is that a glass or plastic lens down the middle? Looks like some kind or bar display to me. Like a signal strength or dB meter. Probably pre LED. Just a guess.


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## texan (Oct 11, 2010)

That is the scanner module from a fax machine or something similar. I have several. Some have good gold..others are not so good.

Texan


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## Chumbawamba (Oct 11, 2010)

It's the scanning element from a scanner.

Here's a whole box of them:




Most scanners have this type of scanning element, along with a mirror assembly and a nice little lens that can be extracted and used as a loupe. Of these, most of the scanning elements are gold-bearing. If you look at it closely (like with the lens that comes out of the carriage assembly  you'll see lots of nice gold bonding wires.

At some point here I'm going to run a batch of these by removing them from the PCB, crushing them up, then treating with, I don't know, poorman's AR?

I'm hoping the yield will be decent (1g per a hundred?) but any amount of recovered gold will be appreciated. Something's got to pay for the labor of extracting the gold bit. I get a few cents a pound for the plastic and keep the glass for a greenhouse I plan to build.


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## glondor (Oct 11, 2010)

Thanks all, There was a scanner in the mix of stuff I rendered today. I must look for more of those!


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## macfixer01 (Oct 12, 2010)

Chumbawamba said:


> It's the scanning element from a scanner.
> 
> Here's a whole box of them:
> 
> ...





Yes pretty much all flatbed scanners use this type of chip called a CCD or Charge Coupled Device. It works something similar to the way Eproms are erased by exposure to UV light. Light causes the charge in a particular cell to leak away to the substrate and the higher the light level the faster it depletes. Memory cells in the CCD are repeatedly charged then read back after exposure to a one pixel row swath of the image. Areas exposed to more light during the exposure period leak off more charge. I believe the data is then shifted out serially to be read. Higher end CCD's have three rows of cells side by side and thin filter strips of red, blue, and green bonded to the window of the CCD so they can read each pixel row in all three primary colors at once. Any conversion from RGB to CMYK is done in software. Low end color scanners may have just a single row CCD and use a color wheel to repeatedly vary the color of the light source timed to the reading. High-end drum scanners often use up to four PMT (PhotoMultiplier) tubes instead of a CCD.

macfixer01


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## glondor (Oct 12, 2010)

Thanks for the tutorial Macfixer. Very interesting. I am fascinated by what I find in electronics. The engineering is wonderful. Unfortunately i do not know what most of these things do.


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## solar_plasma (Jan 10, 2014)

Has anyone after all some yield data for the different kinds of ccd?


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