16 Apr
2012
16 Apr
'12
11:52 a.m.
Should be easy enough to find if one hoarded the
disposable camera
Do camera flash tubes emit enough UV for this? Since it wouldn't be
required for the intneded applciation of taking photos, and since, I
guess, a special quartz tube is needed, I a doubtful.
I wonder if enough UV would get through, say, an
ordinary 75 watt
mercury-vapor luminaire.
I doubt it. The 'black light' tubes used in discos, etc, and the
PCB-exposure tubes do not generate enough far UV to erase EPROMs in a
sensible time.
The UV erase tube looks very different to a PCB exposure tube. The former
is transparent (quartz I guess) amd you can see little globules of
mercury inside. The latter look more like normal fluorescent lamps.
Of course, as somebody said earlier there is a big differece between
corrupting the data in an EPROM and fully erasing it for reprogramming. I
would not storew a valuable EPROM under any UV source, there's a good
chance that Murphy's law will apply and you'll loose at least one bit.
Coversely, if you want to erase an EPROM you can leave it there for weeks
and the last bit will never clear...
-tony