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Sadly one of my Blink cameras failed.. it stopped connecting to the network. Oh well, teardown time! Complex 3 board assembly.... many more parts that I expected: Looking at the top most board three interesting sections: The processor is a proprietary part designed by Amazon. Surprising given how easy it is to buy off the shelf: however, one really unique aspect of this product is it's ability to…
Ali express buy: digital tire pressure gauge Circuit board has a sensor (metal can on top) and integrated circuit (circular epoxy blob in middle) Photo of the sensor: Probably a bridge arrangement with a piezo-resistive element. Basically, a quartz cube sealed with a specific pressure on one side. Photo of the integrated circuit which does the measurement and controls the LCD: Another sighting of…
A recent Ali - express Lora module, the "RA-02" Removing the RF shield shows a circuit board with 3 semiconductors: The SX1278 Lora module An RF switch A NPN Transistor Removing the SX1278 from it's package shows enables this die photo: Here is a close up of the VCO. 1st a photo focused on the metal and then focused on the diffusion layer below. 3D! photo of the RF switch, simple and elegant More…
On the Ali Express website one can find a selection of attractively priced multimeters with pretty good specs. Let's tear down this Aneng M127. It's a general purpose 4000 count meter. Seems suitable for general measurements around the home and car. Both Auto ranging and auto-detecting (which is kind of neat) It's a true-RMS meter, 1% precision, yet only about $9 USD..... cheap and accurate. Let's…
In a recent blog post I took a look at the Apple Airtag2. Airtag 2 Teardown That teardown stopped at the metal layer for the UWB chip, circled in red below. It's not actually just a chip, it has the U2 silicon, RF amplifier and a crystal. The U2 chip top metal looks like this: Now going further let's strip away the metal to get a clearer picture of what's on this device: We see three repeating…
The ESP32 line seems to be pretty popular among the electronics community. I recently purchased a "Guition" JC-ESP32P4-M3 which combines the P4 with the C6. The P4 is Espressif's the fastest offering with a 360 MHz RISC-V processor core. To enable wifi and bluetooth a ESP-C6 is on the same assembly. This is the part I ordered off of Ali-Express: - Metal shield to prevent EMI interference. U.FL…
The Airtag 2 is out. Apple products always worthy of a teardown.... they can be reliably counted on to be state of the art. Airtag 2 updates the bluetooth chip, new ultra-wide-band (UWB) which can do time-of-flight measurements which makes it much easy to find the airtag once close in, and a new speaker both louder and much more difficult to defeat. Case removed. Two coils of wire. Inner wire is…
Ali Express lists Pi Picos for about $2.25 each (including shipping!) That's much cheaper than my local distributor who is only a 5 min drive away (but they only ship via post) so the resulting cost is almost 10x what AliExpress wants. Bargain ! (but only if they work) In this week's video I tear one down: Here are the die photos of the silicon The RP 2040: The quad SPI: Vendor is "Boya", fabless…
Another crazy-cheap item from Ali Express Built around a single integrated circuit from Bluetrum, the AB5656C2. Contains: A RISC V processor core Bluetooth interface Microphone A/D converter Speaker D/A converter Switching regulator power supply The Rest of the circuit board is a 26 MHz Crystal, a switch, a built in PCB antenna for Bluetooth and some discrete R, L,C: At $4.00 it's hard to believe…
In another Ali-Express purchase I bought a digital level.... super useful in the workshop especially for setting blade angles on a table saw. Unlike some purchases I make on that site this product seems to be pretty good.... and even better it seems to have technology that I did not even know existed! Single circuit board construction with three important bits of silicon: Digital levels (tilt…
Behold a heated blanket controller! boring? not even close. The heating element is a 4 layer construction: white protective outer layer tougher plastic waterproof molding around the wire/pull cord nylon like pull cord (white) Nichrome "wire" (actually a ribbon) prized for it's significant resistance per meter Interesting construction. Heated blankets are designed to be washed so much care was…
What's the one thing you think would be important for a rain gauge design? Perhaps being water proof so it works in the rain? Yeah, not this product. In this video I repair, waterproof and reverse engineer this gauge. Bought off Amazon...
An Ali-express find. So cheap! Unfortunately it only works with 2G networks which have long been switched off where I live. However, an excellent opportunity to study some state-of-the-art silicon which contains Digital, interface, RF and even voltage regulation on a single die: The product is based around this single-die GSM phone: The RDA Microelectronics RDA8955L. Left side is RF Middle is…
An interesting find at Ali-Express: a wall switch that can turn on a lamp in a room which was not wired for one originally. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008624426312.html The "remote" is packaged like a light switch...but inside is a RF module and battery. The power-module (on the left) can be wired into a lamp or even a wall socket I imagine. Kind of handy! Taking the cover off the…
The wheel. The lever. The Wedge. The Screw. The pulley. Simple machines which took civilization up a notch. What's the one invention which enables our digital age and most people own at least a billion of (no exaggeration!) The flip-flop of course. To sort down what a flip flop is let's take a look at the "4013". This Dual-D flip flop heralds from the late 1970's so it's going to be easy to see…
A look at an encryption device commonly found on laser printer toner cartridges to ensure the customer only buys replacements from the company which makes the printer. Part of the "blade and razor" strategy first path found by the Gillette company over 100 years ago... and equally and successfully used in most printers these days. Customers very much prefer to purchase a printer for as little…
I built a rather nice fountain a few years ago, however in the summer Algae builds up on the surface of granite and eventually breaks free.... finding it's way into the pump which causes a jam. It's a bit of a hassle to fix the pump as the ~80 pound fountain must be moved. In this project video, below, I repurpose a 21 cent pot scrubber and a bit of 3D print design to hopefully solve my problem.…
What lurks in a common garden light? Voltage controlled oscillators, mosfets, control loops and more!!! Die photo here: Assembly photo here:
I needed to put a rain gauge onto my house and a 3D printed part seemed like an excellent approach. I very much use my 3D printer for functional parts where I simply want them to work. One disadvantage of a 3D part is that they take hours to print. In this example the final design takes 3.5 hours to print so to be productive it's important that the final print be the 1st print! In this video I…
The secrets inside of a digital timer Classic low-power design!
A sad tale.... replaced a bunch of MR16 bulbs with some nice looking Philips bulbs.... but they are pretty heavy. They use a solid glass enclosure, perhaps for superior thermal management? When they fall out they shatter in a most spectacular way! Obvious solution would be to change the fixtures... but there are quite a few of them in my home and they are really expensive! So... let's go slumming…
Reverse engineering what's going on in a semiconductor used to be the domain of some pretty expensive tools. Recently small thermal imagers have become available which allows on to literally "see" what's going on in a semiconductor die! typical photo:
A look at what one of the best-selling, inexpensive, multimeters one can find on the Amazon Shoppping site...... All based around a microprocessor based design from SDIC:
A MR16 LED recently started to produce purple, rather than the desired white light. A problem which is becoming evident as these bulbs start to age. A quick teardown clearly shows the problem.... the yellow phosphor which converts the UV light emitted from the LED starts to fracture and fall off. Without this covering the natural purplish light the LED produces becomes very evident: Here is a…
I needed jet another lab power supply for a project and I decided to simply buy the best selling unit on my countries Amazon web site. For your consideration: the Jesverty SPS-3010N. It's a switching topology (versus linear) which is more "normal" for a lab power supply due to the ease of making a supply well behaved for lab use. Having said that doing some surface testing of the supply under load…