His series of hand-lettered and illustrated electronics books sold over 7.5 million copies and he is widely regarded as one of the world's most prolific citizen scientists.

Mims is a Fellow of the pseudoscientific organizations International Society for Complexity, Information and Design and Discovery Institute which propagate creationism.

Mims' father was an Air Force pilot and the family lived on military bases from Alaska to Florida but their home state was Texas.

Mims wrote an article for the December 1987 issue of Modern Electronics describing his homebrew analog computer complete with schematics and photographs.

This device was similar to RADAR, except it used the newly developed infrared-emitting diode to send intense pulses of light that reflected from obstacles.

A night launch from the roof of his apartment house caused an alert at Tan Son Nhut Air Base.

The December 1969 issue of Model Rocketry carried a press release written by Mims announcing that Reliance Engineering had formed a subsidiary company, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems.

[26] Mims' background in the new technology of light-emitting diodes allowed him to sell a feature story to Popular Electronics magazine.

Ed Roberts and Mims developed an LED communicator that would transmit voice on an infrared beam of light to a receiver hundreds of feet away.

Solomon gave them advice on selling project kits such as the "Opticom LED Communicator" but Mims was really interested in becoming a full-time writer.

[35] In October 1975, Mims convinced Art Salsberg, Editor of Popular Electronics, to offer him a monthly column, the "Experimenter's Corner".

Meanwhile, Salsberg had started another hobbyist magazine, Modern Electronics; and Mims wrote a monthly column and was a contributing editor.

[36] In the 1970s, electronic components such as resistors, capacitors, transistors and even integrated circuits were common enough that interesting projects could be constructed at home with simple tools.

The interest in electronic kits and experiments declined, and in 2003 Radio Shack scaled back their project books and components.

His finding of a drift in ozone retrievals by NASA’s Nimbus-7 satellite led to his first publication in the prestigious journal Nature (F. M. Mims III, Satellite Monitoring Error, Nature 361, 505, 1993 [43] More than twenty of his scientific papers have been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including Nature, Science, Applied Optics, Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Geophysical Research, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Photochemistry and Photobiology, EOS and Research Bulletin of the American Foundation for the Blind.

Mims alleged that Pianka advocated genocide with a genetically enhanced Ebola virus with the goal of exterminating up to 90% of the human population.

[60] [verification needed] Mims' interest in LEDs began in 1962, when he was experimenting with photosensitive devices and discovered the inverse effect.

[sic] So I connected an automobile ignition coil to a cadmium sulfide photoresistor, switched on the power, and observed bright flashes of green light emitted by the semiconductor.

This demonstration was done at 1325 L Street in Washington D.C. —the same site where Alexander Graham Bell invented lightwave communications 100 years earlier.

In a paper published in Applied Optics (1992), entitled “Sun Photometer with light-emitting diodes as spectrally selective photodiodes”,[63] Mims describes how LEDs can function as light detectors.

Dubbed the Sun & Sky Monitoring Station,[66][67] this kit — of which 12,000 units were sold — allowed the user to make sophisticated scientific measurements, including measuring the amount of sunlight, atmospheric haze, atmospheric water vapor, amount of PAR (Photosynthetic Radiation), and the ET (Extraterrestrial Constant).

These include measuring the ozone layer, haze (aerosol optical depth), and the total column water vapor.

[68][69] On February 4, 1990, these instruments were first used at solar noon to measure the ozone layer, haze (aerosol optical depth) and total column water vapor.

The general shape of the data resembles the global water vapor plot in NASA's ongoing NVAP study.

[71] [72] [73] In August 1997, Mims led a 2-man team that measured ozone layer, smoke optical depth, UV-B and water vapor near Alta Floresta in Amazonia.

[74] [75] [76] [77] During the fall of 1996, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center assigned Mims to fly at a moment's notice to a series of 7 major forest fires in Utah, California, Wyoming and Montana.

[80] A twilight photometer is a highly sensitive light meter that is pointed at the zenith sky for up to an hour after sunset or before sunrise.

[83] Since 2013, Mims has used several LED twilight photometers to detect layers of smoke and dust in the troposphere and volcanic aerosols in the stratosphere.

Daughter Sarah used kite-held smoke-and-spore sampling to keep the collection high away from local ground and airs while verifying the remote conditioning of the wind.

Forrest had participated in setting up a stand on the ground for sampling the winds, but Sarah wanted to remove local-air-and-ground influences.