As a PCB designer, I can guarantee that many boards have silkscreen drawings underneath components. That is, as long as it was designed at a fun company.
Best one I ever saw was a dinosaur under an Ethernet plug.
At my company , we do silkscreen things like this with very specific art that only we have and under certain ICs on the board. This is a bit of a way of determining if something comes in for an RMA whether it is legit or not. It’s not foolproof but it has detected counterfeits before.
I haven’t left any cheeky silkscreens like this on my boards yet, but I definitely have my initials hidden on the underside of the board and some stuff that prints if you manage to figure out which pins are the serial interface for debugging lol.
Gotta have some fun while you’re staring at circuits/code all day.
And on my latest board design (no screenshot handy), resistor R2 and diode D2 happened to be right next to each other, so there’s a little droid guarding the connector.
A lot of times it’s a joke related to the code name of the board. I always leave something behind. I can tell that the CM actually reviewed the Gerbers when they ask about the silk screen “instructions.”
I add in little Easter eggs in the top metal on my ICs as well… sometimes designer initials… once a drawing of my dog (whose name we used as the project code name)…
Our intention is not counterfeit prevention, just fun.
Had to hack a few bytes into the Word Star editor on my Z80 CPM Northstar advantage compute so I could get it to pause on control-T so I could insert sub and superscripts to write my thesis. The first thing that popped up on the byte dump was “nosey aren’t we” as an ascii string
Lmao that’s great what were you taking apart?
In the way of board easter eggs, Cisco equipment has quite a few…
There’s the [Circuit Paul Ricard](https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/18ho6k/cisco_uses_formula_1_based_code_names_on_their/), the [Buddhas](https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/10mvr8/found_these_guys_on_a_cisco_catalyst_motherboard/) ([little](https://i.imgur.com/yMaTj.jpg), [big](https://i.imgur.com/HzspF.jpg)), [Frodo Baggins](http://thatsbibulous.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-cisco-gear-and-lord-of-rings.html) and the [Big F***ing Router](https://i.imgur.com/iABCW.jpg) logo (this last one in the GSR12000, at the time one of the fastest routers available). And probably more.
As a PCB designer, I can guarantee that many boards have silkscreen drawings underneath components. That is, as long as it was designed at a fun company.
Best one I ever saw was a dinosaur under an Ethernet plug.
At my company , we do silkscreen things like this with very specific art that only we have and under certain ICs on the board. This is a bit of a way of determining if something comes in for an RMA whether it is legit or not. It’s not foolproof but it has detected counterfeits before.
I’m not nosey, this is my property and I’m doing what i want with it
r/uselessredcircle
I haven’t left any cheeky silkscreens like this on my boards yet, but I definitely have my initials hidden on the underside of the board and some stuff that prints if you manage to figure out which pins are the serial interface for debugging lol.
Gotta have some fun while you’re staring at circuits/code all day.
Am I SUPPOSED to be reading this in Yoda’s voice?
I fuckin love it when I find silkscreen messages from the designer. That’s probably one of my favorite things in this world.
I ran across [“It’s too easy, make it harder…”](https://www.flickr.com/photos/myself248/3612370738/) in some video processing gear.
And on my latest board design (no screenshot handy), resistor R2 and diode D2 happened to be right next to each other, so there’s a little droid guarding the connector.
“We can’t ship it like that, Bob.”
“Fine. I’ll change it to ‘Nosey little ***one***’.”
“Detonation in 5 seconds.”
A lot of times it’s a joke related to the code name of the board. I always leave something behind. I can tell that the CM actually reviewed the Gerbers when they ask about the silk screen “instructions.”
I add in little Easter eggs in the top metal on my ICs as well… sometimes designer initials… once a drawing of my dog (whose name we used as the project code name)…
Our intention is not counterfeit prevention, just fun.
That’s good stuff 🙂
Its the little details that count 😉
Rabbit Hole. Leave that thing alone
I take everything apart (read: everything) and my girlfriend calls me “little one.” She’s going to flip when she wakes up and sees this
Is that real? Font is different and the question mark is *on top* of the grey glue blob.
Circuit board designer, how did you get into it? It seems fascinating.
Is it just me but this looks photoshopped. The print is going onto the glue in the bottom right.??
What headphones were those
What does the sentences mean. I didn’t get it!
Had to hack a few bytes into the Word Star editor on my Z80 CPM Northstar advantage compute so I could get it to pause on control-T so I could insert sub and superscripts to write my thesis. The first thing that popped up on the byte dump was “nosey aren’t we” as an ascii string