Projects

Oura ring wireless charger disassembled. Remove the rubbery surface at the bottom to access the screws. Open the Flex pcb lock to disassemble the flex charging coil, held precisely in place by the plastic casing. Note the thick ferrite on the back of the charging coil.

Clever assembly of light guide where you just push it in and the tiny arm holds it in place by pushing on the metal casing. Quite large LED for the rather low light output it gives?

Note the single sensor, likely an IR light sensor on the back. No idea what it does, but the black plastic might be IR transparent so the sensor could sense if a ring is present? Why not use a hall sensor or something simpler? Interesting nonetheless!

Fixing an IKEA Sunnan lamp today. Someone put normal Alkaline batteries into it a few years ago and that obviously didn't work out. After cleaning out large amounts of crystalline acid, I could put in the new rechargeable NiMH2 batteries.

Third defect old speaker I'm tearing down this Christmas. This one is from Australian bits'n'bob store Smiggle. Extremely simple and quite cleverly made?

Kinda funny and Egg shaped speaker that you twist to extend a white flexible tube. Inside is an self cycling RGB LED that makes it look flashy and more advanced that it actually is.

The Egg has a big counter-weight at the bottom so it won't tip over. Makes it fun to play with. Decent size LiPo battery, but there is absolutely no charging circuitry here? Just a diode that drops the 5V, so this thing might be a fire hazard unless there's some protection inside the LiPo. Cutting the battery open where the wires go in does reveal a small protective circuit, but this is very "bare bones". A study in how cheap you can make electronics?

The PCB itself is extremely simple! Single layer with the TI LM4871 Boomer - a simple 3W amplifier. Only the LED is on the back. But where is the audio input??? I analyze the circuit and understand that it is using the Data plus and minus pins as the audio inputs.

Poking around on the web, I find a picture that shows how this worked. They used a custom cable that basically hacked the USB cable and replaced data with left/right channels from the phone's audio jack. Clever!

This one is packed so thightly and all parts glued in, so impossible not to rip the speaker wires.

Pretty sure this one would live as well if it got a new battery! This one is MUCH simpler singe it's a wired speaker. All it contains is the PT5326 - a 2 watt amplifier with some passives. Amazing that they could sell that many thousands of this device given how simple it is?

It's interesting to see how the bass-reflector works here. It's not active. It's just something for the main speaker to kick off from. Not impressive bass by any means, but it adds to the expense so it must be worth adding.

One of many Bluetooth speakers in our house that no longer work.

Disassembly is easy. Just remove the rubber underneath to reveal the screws. The main chip is the OVC3860. Very capable thing that even has serial control. All looks fine, but the battery is 100% empty.

Disassembled one of my first LIFX lamps when it broke - after 10 years of service. Not bad? Very easy to get access to the wireless control board. Just pop the plastic lid off. The lid is color matched to the aluminium heat sink casing.

Custom and unmarked chips dominate the board. Rf squiggly antenna right on the board.

The LED driver board is kind of as expected- with RGB LEDs strewn around and a ring of 8 LEDs that looks like Osram OsloN?

The high voltage driver is slid into the heat sink. No easy way to get at the electronics as it’s completely potted. That can’t be good for heat dissipation?

The very disappointing LED system of the designer “Soy Lamp”. A puny 3W system that is unable to shine light through the tail of the fish, making this just an extremely expensive mood light. We ripped out the internals to replace it with something better…

Looking at the cost of an IoT device today, so I'm doing a teardown of the $39 Smarter FridgeCam. Based on the contents, I cannot understand how they make any money from it as it's selling for less then the cost of the components. Also, the setup procedure is terrible convoluted and prone to failure, so this product really is a failure.