Tearing Down A Cheap Digital Caliper

A cheap plastic digital caliper gets torn down to reveal how it works: the ruler contains an etched copper strip with repeating T-shaped sections under the scale sticker, while the sliding carriage's PCB uses capacitive sensing plates to detect relative position as it moves. An oscilloscope helps visualize the signals involved. The teardown also explains why these calipers drain batteries so fast in storage—there's no hard off switch, since motion-based display wake-up keeps the device drawing some current at all times.

Source: https://hackaday.com/2026/08/13/tearing-down-a-cheap-digital-caliper. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.