EEVblog #958 - Mailbag

hi welcome to everyone's favorite segment mailbag let's get right into it thank you very much Alex Mitch de zaak I think from the Netherlands height of all my Netherlands our viewers don't know what it is with the crocodile clip Dundee but yes this is a Crocodile Dundee knife so let's crack it open see what we've got all right hang on it's supposed to be vintage but there's no pungent smell yes maybe the oh go card I've got a menu what's over foam peanut things whoa what is this what Oh Sony family studio Wow what is it a video editor console but family studio did people like was this like a Sony consumer thing that people could edit their own tape replay start here stop here it's very very consumer e wow that's fascinating who is popup hood Wow so cider this did this let you I mean it looks very late err probably early 90s maybe perhaps so yeah it's no real yeah that's not an 80s smell real like there's hardly any smell to it this is another family studio video sound effect ah Wow tape CD so this is for ya this is like a consumer level audio and video editing system interesting who knew two minutes teardown nothing else I note here we go we got one sure enough Lex found this in the Attic a video editing back in the day um when the day was we'll find out anyway um Lex has a YouTube channel Linux acid Lee not Lex on acid so I'll link that in down below um yeah hope your software is capable of decoding this message I wrote this in a hurry okay my software your software up here the wetware hmm um foam peanuts love crushing let's go so we have the Sony family's to do video editing controller rme 33 F for those playing along at home and comes with some advanced command modes stuff up here and I don't know is that sort of color like faded yeah I think it has it looks like yep you can see where possibly it's like being in that shadow of UV light and it's discolored stuff like that so anyway that's the bromine in the plastic and we've got this uh video sound effect er as well so we can do various sound effects oh look a cow Moo woof meow Eddy gunshot ahh like oh my goodness and I was are pretty much on the money that it didn't smell 1980s copyright 1991 Sony Corp whoo we've got everything but English so Oh was this a thing ever sold in english-speaking countries under what assumed it was but we certainly haven't got the manual for that but oh man no early 1990s video and sound effect processing terrific and it still works listen to this I'll plug in the external mic [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] let's plug in an external mic here it is here we go voice change now let's try some echo echo check check check one two hello world where's changer where sound like Darth Vader I'm not sure right now until the fifth effects oh how crazy old school is this I designed for home mixing of your VHS tapes cuz it's a VCR input here none of us are professional input rubbish Oh fancy pantsy high quality has got this video and then VCR output here so you play from one VCR and then you can insert all your video and edit stuff and a video on or in this case this is our audio effects and things like that you know pew pew and you can fade things you can mix them between a tape and staff you can external mics they can do voiceovers and and things like that tear you know your home wedding video or something like that so like completely lossy and are you going to feed the app of the VCR into here into here and then rerecord an analog style and year it's not it's not terrific it's not digital like we have these days and then of course we've got some video editing I won't demo the video edit in here it's too long to set up we're going to set up capture devices and actually where are the inputs on this um hello McFly how does this one work the others got all the requisites stuff but this one doesn't have anything well it's obviously designed to hook up to something these are infrared windows by looks of it so what is this designed to hook up to wow I have to try and get the manual for that so yeah I don't think we can trial this out anyway to annotate him all right so let's pop this one open it's got the older the old Sony arrows on there for taking out the screws now I have actually done a full teardown of a professional rackmount Sony video editing system so I'll have to I remember to link that one in down below but this is obviously a consumer thingamabob here we go got the down there is that what's up why are they okay they're just doing that to why I said that's just an isolation plate is it yeah for the exposed mains wiring that's kind of its kind of groovy don't mind that at all and of course this is classic made in Japan all the best stuff made in Japan classic a Sony design and construction double-sided load here this is the bottom side zorbing moon we've got Sony chips which is exactly what we expected Sony make a ton of custom stuff themselves they're one of the biggest were one of the biggest mo they still make their own stuff anyway yet and typical Sony stuff got all their own branded chips the amount of silicon different silicon that they churned out during the 80s and the 90s it was just phenomenal um you know I'm not sure it's the same pace these days you know as technology gets harder and harder and more expensive to spin new chips and stuff but anyway um yeah classic got silkscreen stuff on the bottom here and it's like wave soldered on the bottom yep sort of even there you go you can see that those in ends of the pad there have got the larger solder fee so when the solder wave comes across this which direction does it go do we have a direction arrow I'm not sure usually we have a direction arrow showing which way it goes in the sold above anyway when the solder bath bubbles over here bubbles bubbles bubbles these ensure that you don't get shorts across pins it's just a you can see it on there as well so yep I've mentioned that many many times but let's look at the top side well that's interesting on the top side here these two main chips upside down all the electrons are going to fall out these are Oki part there's an m60 for 22 - our 49 so these like a specific sound effect chips or something perhaps hmm anyway classic single in line of a little light amplifier / our transistor arrays stuff like or arm yeah based on the caps they're doing some audio amplification got ourselves some crusty faders here a couple of tactile switches and lots of caps as you'd expect in that audio stuff but that's about all she wrote not a huge amount up here with us some regulation using some mud discrete there by the looks of it and some bridge rectifiers but check it out you see the original color of the case here this gray because I had had this a quick reference card on the bottom and that just slid in there like that and that protected all of that from fading and inside the other one is exactly what you'd expect having no video inputs at all it's simply an infrared controller and sure enough what are two infrared LEDs over there so it's hooking up to some other system there's no mains it's just a six volt DC plug back in and that's all she wrote oh we've got another infrared receiver here and well that's like that's it there's nothing on the other side really it's boring as badboo oops somebody goofed look at that tiny little footprint there for a tiny cap and they went nope we need a much bigger cap in there how can we fit it no let's just bend it over and silastic it down thank you very much mmm there we go um but that's about all LCD came off zipper strip I'll keep that zebra strips like hard to buy zebra strips just on their own worth keeping these puppies having a drawer in your jumpring just for those zebra strips very nice anyway ah Mitsubishi yeah Mitsubishi Mitsubishi it's a Mitsubishi fest for you Mitsubishi area fanboys out there but it's basically a big glorified a TV remote control that's pretty much all it is hmm oh by the way if you want one of these t-shirts then I've actually re-enabled the teespring campaign so you can order the negative feedback t-shirt the triple five timer t-shirt haven't had that one available for a while and the warranty void if not removed t-shirt as well link down below anyway next up hide all my Swiss of viewers this one's from Adrienne no read Oh raid oh thank you very much and I believe this one is a present hang on huh what's going on here okay let's have a look phone oh and photo taken in Switzerland our salute Dave so first of all thank you to the staff I know it's not so anyway yeah we send you our two t-shirts thank you very much in different sizes I'm generally a small or a medium size t-shirt and we wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year thank you very much I'm from Adrienne Michael Gyan Gyan Frank who took the picture Michael I'm at an tween and and Tony Oliver and Julianne not in the picture of Rideau networks in Switzerland there you go thank you very much guys what's that white stuff I do not understand um yeah oh I love the anesthetic it's so aesthetic shielding bag um oh oh oh I'm liking this check this out look at it it's Danny numb the acadec a style of course at Tesla Edison I don't know what the Teslin versus Edison five it's a YouTube video I'll link it down below I have to check it out but thank you very much that is awesome Wow pay up our by III meetup.com acadec er ACDC get it hi Dan almost Carr Goines Chicago Heights in Chicago I haven't been to Chicago but think your ads Ryan Rudin um I'm not quite sure the description of this things like why um I guess we'll find out so let's have a bowl and we have a note which might explain what we've actually got here if I can do a two minute teardown oh yeah probably could anyway what that won't show you up close ill will in a second there little fiber adapters so it looks like they plug in fiber modules for Oh Cisco one gigabit per second that SFP optical transceivers up to 550 multimode fiber and the other ones for 70 to 100 kilometres single-mode fiber jeez that brings back memories I'm working on that multimode fiber stuff I worked on multimode fiber stuff for seismic exploration stuff of course the multimode was good for short-distance aren't like you know hundreds of meters like this 550 meters but single mode fibers were used for like the long distance telecommunication you know underwater links and stuff like that so cool 2-minute teardown hopefully I think we can pry these open hmm and here's the multimode a module for those playing along at home let's take a look inside this it's only a class one laser so don't get all excited tada we're in like Flynn really interesting we're going to have a laser diode and then a photodiode over here for receiver so once transmitted so we're going to have a laser diode driver I'm not sure which ones what laser diode driver and photodiode transceiver curiously they look very similar have a look at that but this is rather interesting what's these used to join it like that look it's you know I like off the board there but it almost looks like that's a chip I'm going to have to read the part numbers off that is that just a pass through or does it do something else as well anyway that's really interesting is not much in it of course these just plug into the sisqó you know router e type things and this is like a thousand base T you know Ethernet type our fiber module but that's all she wrote in them there's not much but I'll link in the datasheet down below there's your two chippies for those playing along at home as well hide all my Canadian viewers this one is from a person unknown but I think I might know who it's actually from possibly a fellow youtuber you may know um so let's cuz there's not many Canadian youtubers in our field is that anyway um he did say he would send this to me and this is ridiculous Oh actually it's quite dead well is it delicate nah it's anyway it is from thought ah doesn't have his contact details on it nerd rage with a you thank you very much out Lincoln nerd rages channel down below and he did this awesome video on gnar tritium powered Oh a tritium power source that would last for like 50 years or something whatever the half-life of tritium is and stuff like that and here it is this is the one and only prototype that he made that was in his video and it uses these little tritium vials video it's excellent I'll link it in more probably at one of those YouTube card things somewhere here or pop-up there may be around about there click that little info button on the card or whatever and it will pop up hopefully um a tritium battery you can buy these little tritium vials that like glow-in-the-dark vials you can buy them on eBay and Alibaba and Aliexpress and all that sort of jazz really cheaply and of course tritium will just give out constant life life for the life of the vial um you know what's the half-life of that tritium anyway so he got to thinking what if I coupled these two solar cell so he put a solar you know Aiden standard are amorphous I think because the morphus solar panels are going to work better in low light that's why your I don't know solar-powered calculator here over there no solar power calculators use a more facility solar cells because they're more efficient at really low power levels and stuff like that you know they're crap to put on your roof for large-scale energy production solar energy production but they're better for the solar cells like this anyway you set this to me so I'm going to see what I can power with this puppy he's already done extensive our characterization of this and got the efficiency curve and the power curve and everything else so that's in his video so very cool thank you very much nerd rage and oh we can see what we can power with this puppy it's really interesting it's only a tiny amount of power it's microwatts I think it's like like 5 micro watts or something like that so you can pair a calculator or something else with it but not much else but the interesting thing is the solar cells are actually looking at the light come in from the tritium so you could power like a watch or something real low-power watch or a low-power calculator or something like that you can buy these commercially but this one is much much cheaper and actually gives a higher output than the commercial one I'm not sure if it's higher per unit volume umm but yeah you can make your own tritium nuclear battery basically because it's the decay of the tritium itself what it does is that the tritium emits and there's a phosphor coating inside the tritium vials inside the vials in here there are sealed vial or tritium inside and that's what and they hit the phosphor coating and that's what makes them glow and of course then you just like in this case I believe they're green and green is are around about the optimum wavelength are for amorphous silicon efficiency so you want the green you can get them in different colors buy them in different colors on eBay but it's really cool I mean it's but the problem with this is if you compare it to like a CR just to CR 2032 battery which is much smaller than this that will basically at 5 or 10 micro M that this thing is going to give you out that cr2032 will last the shelf life of the battery so 10 years so yeah this might last 50 years or something like that if nothing goes wrong with the solar cells don't deteriorate and stuff like that but you know yeah just a regular off-the-shelf cr2032 battery can do the same thing in much less volume for at least 10 years so yeah yeah they might leak before that but they're generally pretty good I mean or a silver oxide cell or whatever you know long low power so you want to use so they're not very practical but they're just cool you know the fact that you can get take these tritium vials and convert them with solar cells into power I love it brilliant idea and there it is I'll have to do a separate video playing with this I don't want to do it in the mailbag Oh like uh you know plug it into some various things and power them up but anyway let's I'm sure it still outputs a voltage let's try it and sure enough if we wrap it up in some our foil which we have to do of course because these are solar cells so any light residual light here in the lab and you got to have light to film this video then it's going to generate the voltage but I trust me like you know I put my hand over that and like put a dark turn off lights everything else it's going to give me it's giving one point six five volts out from one side of the solar cell the earth solar cell on the other side is going to give out a similar voltage because they're those round little lar vials in there but anyway very cool and of course it's not going to give out much current at all and actually we can measure that go over to micro amps over here it's generating bugger or like point six micro amps our short circuit current yeah so yeah that's not much but oh you can run a little flea powered modern ARM processor like a gecko from something like this so show this in a future video stay tuned so there you have it that is a nuclear battery using tritium as a power source well be it through some fluorescence on the tubes and then a stock stand and amorphous solar cell but yeah it's pretty cool oh yeah look at that nuclear glow Oh next up hide almost sandy a guy in San Diego in viewers know San Diego viewers from San Diego Oh what do you call yourselves I don't know um and thank you very much i Elliott boy who said this thing is let's have a look what it is we have a note with the ziplock bag for our protection it's key fob it's an RF key fob with an RFID card from a tiny labs I'm linked in down below down below tiny labs dot IO it's a device to that Elliott created and it's funded via Kickstarter it's called the kisi ki Sai allows the user to clone nearly any RFID credential that operates at 125 kilohertz ah for building access control I have RFID our control 125 kilohertz for the eevblog lab built-in here I'm going to test it out will it be able to clone my card we'll find out awesome alright let's have a look at this puppy from Elliot from my tiny labs I like the name tidal labs I couldn't get tiny labs , I guess um and this is a smart key fob for cloning these cards so you know here's a blank one but I've got these access to our both of my both the lab and my office as well so I'm going to see if I can clone this puppy they're only works on 125 kilohertz cards which is your traditional ones for your building access control anyway uses a gecko tiny gecko energy micro with you know anyway cortex m3 efm32 and generates a 75 volts ALC tank circuit from the cr2032 and it you can program for individual buttons to clone these cards brilliant alright so let's give it a bow I got the instructions hold down a button for 10 seconds jeez okay okay red LED will start to blink once per second where's the red LED I assume we're gonna see it somewhere after 10 seconds come on you can do it you can do it what so that was a big fat fail armed is the battery dead I'll have to measure the thing anyway there's our coil beautiful how many turns in that couple under turns FM Gekko and all the just the smarts in there and the battery that's that's it I like it sure enough that battery was dead as a dodo measured absolutely nothing um so I don't know let's uh hold down a button not sure which way it's supposed to go is that the lid there I didn't see it come on twiddle your thumbs there we go okay it's blinking put it on the tag and we'll blink faster while it's reading the credentials from the card I think it's blinking faster and it should read successful you'll see the green LED for two seconds note we saw a red LED so it was not successful don't there we go blinking green it works with my other card for the office so it didn't work with this one well so yeah it may be some sort of a compatibility mode why it could read one and not the other that is a working card I keep that in my wallet every day to access the lab so um anyway we'll go try it on the garbage room of my office it read that key so the neat thing about this is that you can actually palm this you know and if you had access to somebody's card then you could you know secretly press a button and oh yeah I'm swiping the card or whatever you know if you're really good at palming stuff and you could copy somebody's card by just holding it for 10 seconds or something like that without them realizing so that's kind of that's neat this works just to keep don't work it does not work hide all my Swedish viewers this one's from Grothman bill bill Ruffman I think I don't know is that a company name or is that a person's name I'm not entirely sure but let's check it out wasn't sealed it was just sort of like folded over Oh what do we got we've got some sort of module thing it's a magnet Morril egg I have no idea what that mod oh yeah there's some connections on that looks very automotive um very automated like connection recent replace this telematics gateway on a 2011 Dodge Charger there you go contains a pretty serious boil it um info from the service manual displaying information in the integrated centre stack screen module what anyway our Frederick graffman thank you very much Frederick 2-minute teardown automotive stuff always interesting the automotive stuff they're built like a brick in the proverbial brick dummy and they're you know real high quality construction let's check it out there we have it inside this integrated centre stack a screen controller module for a 2011 Dodge Charger I'm not sure what type of our screen inside it does charger but that's why it needs a big beefy ARM processors probably maybe running some you know embedded Linux or something like that to display all the stuff on the center console so I'll get all sorts of power stuff around there these would be top-notch caps everything else so and that's an interesting package look at that ST it's a power it's got some power tabs on there so there's going to be a thermal pad on the bottom that's obviously part of our DC to DC converter here it's a dead giveaway by its proximity to these inductors it's just a big ass over-engineered package but that's all she wrote of course you're going to have some bypass in big BGA however they have many hundreds of pins that is that's just a classic example of a real high quality automotive board there's no were conformal coating finish on that but you know it's real high-quality a fiberglass and you know they're really well engineered and they're using top quality paths everything else automotive stuff is very well designed and very expensive for a reason I don't like an ad in viewers in particular Ryan Oakley for pronouncing that correctly from Timmins in Ontario in Canada love Canada jeez it'll be a bit chilly this time of year wouldn't it Ontario Canada it's summer here in Sydney you didn't know um just fantastic so let's I got another button oh hang on protective tab was easy it was easy that was easy there we go that was easy just press it once it's in to add to my collection of buttons um what heavy what's this oh it's a bird's a blackberry tablet I didn't know blackberry made tablets um I wasn't into the whole BlackBerry thing but duh that looks no it's not broken it's a blackberry tablet does it work it's a BlackBerry PlayBook tablet this came around about the same time as the iPad if your record I at a high hopes true but it was lucky it was Canadian Canadian design was it um I assume not Canadian manufactured possibly but it was like in a few ways such as poor Wi-Fi lack of apps and stuff like that okay interesting maybe two minutes tear down our looks I don't know it's not over mold it's got a little thing but yeah we'll have to you know open it up like any other tablet sort of prise it open hmm so did anyone have one of these things let us know in the comment anyone still using the BlackBerry PlayBook sorry for the reflective screen this I hate do we know videos for these sort of real reflective screens like this you know you've got to have a proper studio set up to do it hi and we're in like Flynn now that wasn't too hard the back just prized off there we're going to go a little antenna there a couple of little antennas there and we've got our battery straight up all of our processing is going to be under here looks like it's under a metal shield er can I believe it's low Thierry TI OMAP processor nice little screws holding and board holding down the ribbon to board interconnect for the battery there twenty or twenty odd watt hours um this is interesting why have we got a second it looks like a second battery here but what as a peek under the hood there's our own map process of the L pider chip there that's actually got the integrated memory and the processor built into one but there's another 16 gig SanDisk one here we've got some power management around there can tell it's power management because of all the well inductors around the outside there dead giveaway but that's about all she wrote so yeah that actually looks like a two part battery in here if you get the board not sure if you can see that I won't take the whole thing apart this is only a mail bag teardown but yeah yeah we've got some our protection circuitry under there and also under there as well but you might be able to see a little ribbon with some power traces coming out that's going to sneak over to this side here so they're basically like paralleling those two batteries up and I guess that counts not sure if it's to 220 watt hour batteries or or that's just the total spread between the two but that's interests you know they've got the main processor board in the middle of that fascinating hmm I love this recycle does anyone recycle their old lithium-ion batteries in stuff which are in practically every disposable gadget these days I don't think so it's a real shame hmm thank you very much Christopher name'll no mala anyway I don't want my German and vo is is from Deutschland um doesn't know didn't say where I think I scribbled it out with my pen anyway ah let's open this puppy up let's hope not from the bottom let's be a bit rebel like and tongue angles important all right let's see if all the electrons are gonna fall out oh yeah I shouldn't have done that oops Wow oops hang on this looks suss doesn't it ah they're out of order I'll put them back there actually are surface-mount resistor vials it's a surface mount resistor kit um I'm going to assume that that's kind of like laser cut um you see shop de douche um I'm assuming that they made it that's kind of cool I like that it looks kind of very laboratory like with the vials and these are various resistors and then you've got other ones over here but you've got two twice sorry umm yeah they'd be ours um Oh zero ohm jumper links cuz you got to have zero ohm jumper links that's really kind of cool I didn't it takes up a lot of space but um that just looks very laboratory light so I'm going to assume ah cool Sagan's gonna love these thank you very much LEGO City LEGO City terrific and OH vintage vintage hold on your hats vintage four-banger a Centron bio later oh I think we've got some biorhythm action biorhythm action look at that biorhythms were the thing in probably what the early 80s or something like that um so I think this is a cap this is actually a dedicated calculator for you but yet a date button and for your biorhythms oh goodness what a shocker oh man yeah biorhythm does anyone still did biorhythms anymore I mean geez we got the original manual and everything for it Wow here you go beautiful what else we got ah chocolate thank you very much well Eagle vole Milch uh Ritter it's a Ritter chocolate awesome and more vials more vials oh okay this comes from digi-key so are these e can you get the vials from digi-key oh no I'm sorry they're just empty vials okay I didn't know you could get these empty vials oh sorry no it's not no it's just a wireless starter kit it's a bag for something else containing all empty vials so you can put your own um oh and a little um gummy bear type things very eclectic mix what on earth is that hang on play the wobble board no I'm not Rolf Harris yes Christopher does a kits are linked to this is website down below for this the other thing is a titty also does this something tiny grill it's a prototype oh no no I think it does do it hey edges are very sharp oh yeah no kidding um it's a small insert for regular coal barbecues you fill it up with car light it and start grilling fast ah it's an insert interesting I'll link it down boy maybe even try it on the Barbie this Christmas so there it is that's a cool way to hold it just it looks very Liberace like there's the little chip resistors down in there and you can have chip caps and chip inductors or whatever and that's it you you see shop dot de link down below it's kind of sort of neat I like this thing has got what they written all over it I mean look at the sin Tron BIOS bio liter um it's a basic it's a real crappy four-banger calculator but you can know can you change modes what the hell's going on there anyway you can enter dates is it I'm not sure what's the story there um yeah anyway it does sort of work as a four banger calculator but oh my goodness ah we've got the original manual art not in English so if anyone wants to translate this go ahead and yeah let's hang on where's the interesting stuff let's get into the biorhythms here we go ah no no no why did does anyone still do biorhythms these days come on I mean it it's like it's not even worth opening there's no magic foo in there all right you know I had to open it just to play with the nipple oh you loved the nipple so that's the last mail bag for 2016 thanks to everyone who sent in stuff it's been awesome and if you like mail bag please give it a big thumbs up I'm sure it'll be back and next year and everyone have a happy Christmas and New Year's I'll catch on the other side but I still got a couple of more videos to come I think I haven't shot him yet but yeah you know I don't take a break I live a sad life catch you next time you

Channel: EEVblog

Views: 147,917

Rating: 4.894053 out of 5

Keywords: eevblog, video, nuclear battery, tritium battery, how do, diy, solar cell, blackberry playbook, sony, video editing, system, teardown, nurdrage

Id: yNQCaSNIrEM

Length: 39min 8sec (2348 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 19 2016