No, not the bear. This thing:
Old plastic case with some wires, half-buried in dirt and leaves. Inside…
I had no idea what this was. But a friend of mine said it was a primitive pressure sensor.
“The pressure sensor moves the lever that moves the slidewire creating a variable voltage.
Op-amp, capacitors, and resistors condition (amplify/attenuate, filter) the signal.”
And annoted the pic for me.
Cool!
At this point I thought maybe I should clean off the writing at the bottom and look that up.
Aha! Viz was apparently an extremely popular maker of radiosondes. And this particular part is an old baroswitch. So this thing probably fell from the sky 30-40 years ago after being dangled from a weather balloon.
Cats And Guillotines 