AliExpress unbagging joy - Hells smoke (READ WARNING) - self resetting fuses

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]It is time for another glorious unbagging of Joyous technical tat. Let's get straight into this. And one of the things I want to look at first here is this uh electric nail grinder. So, let's get this open. The reason I'm opening this first is that it is rechargeable. I believe I think it's rechargeable. Let me just put this out the way.

[00:00:22]And that means that it may or may not have a charge. Oh, it's actually a rotating disc in the end.

[00:00:30]Oh, and it's spinning. Oh, and there's a we slot you put your finger through and then you grind your nail. Except I've not got nails, so I can't actually grind it. Let me try and No, it's not. Right.

[00:00:42]Tell you what, h I'll push that again.

[00:00:44]Oh, it has multiple multiple levels.

[00:00:46]Let's try and get this off. How does this come off? It comes off like that.

[00:00:51]And it is just a spinning. It's not what I was expecting, but that's okay.

[00:00:59]Oh, it's not super powerful. Let's try it full speed.

[00:01:03]Okay. Right. So, yes, it grinds nails and it's rechargeable. Lovely. I think it is designed for uh cleaning the ends of a specific length of nail though, but not when you you nibble them completely flat. Okay. Well, that worked. That's good.

[00:01:20]It might be useful for the three the charging circuitry and the three-step motor control. It might have other uses.

[00:01:27]What's next?

[00:01:29]This This is a They've been around for so long. It's actually a little stepper motor with a driver and it's aimed at Arduino, but it's not just strictly restricted to Arduino. You can use it in other projects as well. Now, I've cleared some of that stuff. Maybe I should try and brighten this image up just a little bit.

[00:01:52]Like that. So, it comes with the driver which is based on a ULN23.

[00:01:59]That's actually a H I think that's a 7way Darlington driver, but they're only using four. But they've got the positions for some versatility. You might have to solder directly onto pins, though. However, it connects to this little motor. And this motor, the reason it's so dirt cheap, uh it's a geared motor with a clutch. The reason it's so cheap is because these are used everywhere. They're used in uh air conditioning systems and their their main purpose is the little louver. And what happens is that when you turn it on, the computer sends a stream of pulses. It just assumes it's the worst case scenario. It's going to be the worst. It's going to be say if this was a louver um and it's wanting to actually get it up to the sort of vertical level, it assumes it's at the worst position and it will wind x number of pulses to bring that up to the top level. But if it started off at a mid position, it will just stall against that and then slip in its clutch. But at that point, it knows it's got a specific reference position and it can send strings of pulses to actually change the angle of the louver or pan it backwards and forwards. It's just they're so mass-produced that they're dirt cheap.

[00:03:05]They're very, very handy little things.

[00:03:08]talking of things like this. One of the reasons I got this uh is because it says LED purification fixture. It's not. Where is that coming from? Is it just copied text? Power 10 watt color 6,500K, which is very cold white. And they do them in 12 24 or universal voltage. I got the universal voltage one. Let's power this up. Let me get the bench power supply on.

[00:03:34]Let me slice the tape in this.

[00:03:38]And I'm expecting this to be a fairly standard extruded lighting assembly.

[00:03:45]It is with a double-sided pad so you can stick things permanently onto surfaces.

[00:03:54]Um there's the wires and we'll pop we'll open this up. We'll take a look inside.

[00:03:59]It's got these little clips. ones that you can basically um screw these to the wall and then when you actually push it up against the wall it clips in. He said making a very loud clicky noise. Right.

[00:04:12]Tell you what, what's the bench power supply set at conveniently it's set at 13 volts. That's fine. Let's uh power this up.

[00:04:21]And it is lit. Does it have intensity control? No, just on and off. Right.

[00:04:25]Okay. So, let's uh see how this looks uh as the main recording lighting.

[00:04:33]And it's drawing 6 uh amps at 13 volts at the moment. So, yeah, about say about 6ish watt. Is that what it said on the thing? But it could be used to actually you could record with this. It's actually quite a useful amount of light.

[00:04:49]It would be good as a general sort of bench light, particularly given its wide voltage range. Okay, watch your eyes.

[00:04:55]The light is going to get marginally brighter.

[00:04:58]Okay, so we have seen it lit.

[00:05:01]Let's open it up. I'm going to guess there is a buck regulator in here. Now, these things normally have a little clip.

[00:05:09]Where is that clip going to be? They sometimes punch the plastic.

[00:05:16]Um, or it could be glued. Not really sure. That looks promising. Lifting that up has popped that off. Okay. And we'll do the same at the other end. Since I don't really know which end, I would guess this end is the ballast. Or is it on the circuit board?

[00:05:33]It's on the circuit board. So, uh, we've got the incoming supply. We've got a clicky onoff button. And then we've got a 100 volt capacitor. That's quite a wide range um at the voltage range. It's got standard buck regulator. There's a diode, couple of current sense, resistors, and all that. And the chip they're using is a 914C AO1C H. Let me uh let give you a closeup of that. Let me bring in this.

[00:06:05]So, where is the chip? There is the chip.

[00:06:10]Are you going to get that number?

[00:06:13]Uh 914 C1C. Not sure what that is.

[00:06:17]Interesting.

[00:06:19]Uh maybe worth exploring later on. I wonder what voltage the LEDs are. Wonder what how they're configured.

[00:06:25]Uh I can see actually that is going to be it's kind of difficult to see under here, but I'd guess it's going to be a decent string of LEDs, but it will be regulating it probably down to about 9 volts or something like that. I do see that these are wired as uh triples. So that probably is 9 volts and then it seems to be running along that. Okay.

[00:06:46]Right. I should put that out of the way and I reassemble it later on and we can maybe actually explore the circuitry in that if there's time because you know so many so many things.

[00:06:57]What's next? Little dinky things. Read switches. This should be fairly easy to demonstrate.

[00:07:04]Read switches are a very simple magnetic switch. They've got a long history particularly in telecommunications. And one of the nicest things about them, let's see if I can do this.

[00:07:15]I don't even know if you'll hear that.

[00:07:16]I'll hold it up to the microphone and I'll hold the magnet up to to see if you can hear it clicking.

[00:07:25]I don't know if you're going to hear that. It's very, very quiet. Anyway, here's a magnet. Let's get a meter.

[00:07:32]Does this one have a continuity sounder?

[00:07:34]Yes, it does. And it's got croc clips.

[00:07:36]Well, that's convenient.

[00:07:39]So, I shall put that on there. And the whole concept of these little read switches is it's two fine metal reads inside uh in little vacuumed glass encapsulation. The reads are just held apart, but when you hold a magnet nearby them, they attract together magnetically and that's what makes the connection. So at the moment it's open circuit. Um let's zoom down this a little bit and the meter is showing open circuit. I hold this magnet near it and uh when it gets close enough, you can see the continuity there. Very simple things. No fancy electronics involved. Just a simple switch, not rated for very high current, but uh you do get high current ones, but very, very simple and interesting things. They're not dangerous, so they're not going to be banned anytime soon, probably like the mercury switches.

[00:08:35]I shall turn the bench power supply off just in case it's making ultrasonicy noises. Some people have complained about that in the past. I have an interesting gadget now that will be able to detect that. I shall show you it at some point very soon.

[00:08:49]Next component here. I've got a few small components. This one is interesting. I tend to get these from a more reputable source and I don't know how good they are, but these are what are called PTC electronic fuses, positive temperature coefficient thermister. Um, can I rig this up in a way? I think these ones are rated. What What are they rated? Um, which is this one. I'm going to have to check what current rating this is. It should be printed on it.

[00:09:22]I think it's 1 amp because it says UF110. So that's possibly 1.1 amp. Let me try and rough something up to demonstrate this. So here's the demo setup. I've got some LED neon a full run of it which is going to draw about 2 amps and this little 1 amp electronic fuse in line and it acts like a slowb blow fuse in that it will allow an over current for x amount of time. But then once that heats up its resistance starts increasing. It limits the current to the load and then it reaches an equilibrium point that the device. It's just cut out that it's passing enough current. You can see that the load will be energized very slightly, but it's passing enough current just to keep itself hot. And the only way to reset it is to turn the power off and let it cool down. So, if I uh well, I'll haste it up by touching the fingers just to cool it with my fingers. Oh, that is very hot. But that's the way it works. Um, and then once it's cooled down a bit, it will work again. But again, once it's overloaded again, like it is at the moment, it will cut out. And you'll see it just sort of gradually fade out.

[00:10:30]Well, fade out in a fairly vivid manner.

[00:10:32]I'll turn the light off here so you can see that.

[00:10:36]There it goes. Just faded down to a lower setting. It will reach that delicate balance point. Okay, watch your eyes. The light is about to come back.

[00:10:44]And I can turn the power off to that.

[00:10:45]The demonstration's been done. And the nice thing about these is that they are self-resetting. Uh under the extreme fault conditions, it will quickly trip and uh break the circuit and uh then if the power's turned off and the faults cleared, it will uh reinstate the circuit. Very good. I use them in my designs.

[00:11:09]What's next? There. Let's look at an expensive thing next.

[00:11:14]This is the Anel BM200 battery monitor.

[00:11:18]They seem to be in vogue at the moment.

[00:11:21]And these devices, I'm going to You have to use a knife to slip this one open.

[00:11:25]These devices basically connect across your car battery. And it claims to give lots of information, but in reality, it's just a voltage monitor by the look of it.

[00:11:39]Let's take a look at it.

[00:11:49]It's very small and it's got some lugs and you connect it to your car battery with those lugs.

[00:11:57]That's a very small circuit board and not a display or anything. Um, let's see how far we can get with this.

[00:12:05]Is it screwed together? There is a screw, but it's not it's not I can't feel it under here. I think there is a screw holding in. I think this deserves its own video. And we can test it and analyze it. But the idea is you it h connects the battery and it logs it acts like a data logger. And it when you start your car, it measures maybe ambient temperature, not sure, but it measures what the voltage dips down to as you start the car. um to give an indication of battery health and uh just sends via Bluetooth. The status says 1.5 milliamps. That's actually quite a lot.

[00:12:41]I wonder what it actually draws. Well, it's one way to find out. Uh on goes this.

[00:12:48]In fact, I'll set the meter up and we can check it.

[00:12:51]Okay, there's a little blinking light in there. Don't know if you'll see it or not. little blue light and it's displaying roughly about say 1 milliamp which isn't too bad actually but still uh it's still a noticeable load on the car battery particularly if you leave the vehicle out of use for any length of time. Okay. Right. So that's uh worth exploring.

[00:13:15]There's a few different ones and I did see one that also had a display in it.

[00:13:21]Um, which may actually in hindsight maybe I should have got that one because it would have actually been more a visial cuz this one is not visual. It's basically it's a sticker in the front with a little light underneath that makes the clear plastic case blink. Okie dokie. Right. Well, I shall stick that back back in there wherever it was packaged. Did it even have a little case? I don't think it did. Anyway, in that goes and I'll stuff that in there and I'll stuff it in and we can take a look at that later on. I don't think it's going to be quite up to the same state as the test battery testers and conditioners and things like that that actually uh do a proper high current test in the battery. But having said that, it's using the car to do the high current test and it's gleaning its data from how the battery performs during that high current test. So, it's not a bad idea.

[00:14:13]What's next?

[00:14:15]Five pieces NCT2 orange. I haven't a clue.

[00:14:23]Are they lights?

[00:14:26]They're terminals.

[00:14:28]Oh, I see what these are.

[00:14:31]These are the ones. You got a little clip here and it's IDC. Let me find a suitable screwdriver to pop the clip on this. I shall use. No, I won't because I can't see it. Oh, there it is.

[00:14:44]There's a suitable screwdriver. Assuming I'm doing this right. Maybe I'm not doing it right. That hinges up. And it is actually a little hinge. Uh, let me zoom in this.

[00:14:55]And you basically lay a wire across it.

[00:14:58]And it's got IDC connectors. Not a huge fan of IDC connectors, particularly open ones. The tele telecommunication ones are fine because they've got the gel that excludes oxygen. They're not being subject to vibration like in vehicles.

[00:15:09]But the idea is you can clip this over a wire, crimp that down so it pushes the wire down into that splice.

[00:15:18]Uh, and then you can connect with these standard sort of little lever terminals to connect onto that wire and use it as a bus wire.

[00:15:27]Interesting.

[00:15:29]Not sure how good that would be. I'm not sure I'd trust it myself to be honest, but that's uh maybe worth getting anyway and just taking a look at maybe doing a little test on. A long-term test is what would be needed to see if these were as shony as I think they could be.

[00:15:45]Let's put this out the way and we'll zoom back out again to a sensible level.

[00:15:55]Uh this is if you're sick of LEDs then the retro option is still available.

[00:16:04]Tiny little they call them grain of wheat or uh grain of rice lamps. These are tiny little lamps. What the voltage rating before I connected to the wrong voltage. It's 12 volts. I'll tell you what the current is but it's a very very tiny little tungsten lamp. Used to be very popular with mod modelers. Probably still is. But having said that, uh it depends if you want LEDs or you want the I suppose it's a retro tungsten look. Um so let's turn the voltage down a little tad here cuz it was up a bit higher. And we'll connect this to the bulb and see how bright it is. It's not super bright. It's just a little glowing tungsten dot. So that's 12 volts at 71 milliamps. Turn the voltage up a little tad more to get it to 12. So yeah um so let me do the computations in that 12 volt times 073 it's at equals8 watt. So you know it's basically it's the best part of a 1 watt lamp. Okay. I don't know how long they'd last. Now, when I was young, I made a set of fairy lights, Christmas lights for a little tiny conifer tree outside in the steerwell of the clothes. And I made it using ultra thin wire and bits of heat shrink sleeving and then put uh they were 12vt lamps. Were they 12vt lamps? I put enough in series that it ran them at half their sort of rated voltage. So, they were just a gentle glow, but they ran directly off the mains. Not perhaps the safest thing, but it looked lovely and they lasted a good length of time. I don't think they actually failed. I think I just uh moved on to the next thing. I think the tree may have died at some point, the little carnivor tree.

[00:18:01]Probably while I was working away from home and the neighbors uh asked them to water the plants if they could. It was just like one or two in the clos. They didn't. They died. story of my life with uh working away from home and next thing. Oh, right. Okay.

[00:18:19]This is a taya smart breaker.

[00:18:28]Taya being a very popular internet of things brand which uh seems to be used by a lot of manufacturers and this in particular is a programmable kind of circuit breaker but it's not a circuit breaker in normal sense.

[00:18:46]It's got a relay in it presumably. This is begging to be opened. I'm not sure what this one can be programmed with.

[00:18:54]It's rated. It connects to Wi-Fi and it's rated uh between 1 and 63 amps and you could program with this current rating but the question is is it a continuously powered relay which would be safer. You're relying on a computer in here for your overcurren protection which isn't necessarily great because if it crashes and the relay is latched on then there's no protection the wiring at all for overcurren. But the other thing is uh is if it's a remnant re remnants relay that is powered to switch on then powered to switch off. It could be left powered on when the power supply in this fails. Some of the other ones have a motorized mechanism that trips actual circuit breakers and those ones are dangerous cuz the breakers are rated for 100 amps and but you can program it. Say it's a lighting circuit. It's only going to be six amps. Um but if the electronics fail on it, that breaker reverts to being a 100 amp breaker and your wiring will potentially go on fire.

[00:19:48]Lovely. But there's uh various options with these. You can choose which options you want. Uh and it's kind of colorcoded. I'm not sure what this one has.

[00:19:59]Some of the remote metering data.

[00:20:03]And the other thing is you can sometimes Wi-Fi into these connect remotely um and uh change their settings which isn't great because that means that when a circuit breaker is causing at regular trips you might get someone lazy who remotely goes in and just doubles the rating just to solve the problem. That's not a great idea. I'm not a fan of these things. They're not they're not safe.

[00:20:30]Novel but not safe. Okay. H what is this? Oh, right. Okay.

[00:20:38]What else we got here? Oh, yeah. Let's take a look at these. These are completely non electronic. I don't know what they're going to look like. They are sun catchers. Little crystals. Oh, you know they're that AB crystal. It looks very colorful.

[00:20:55]These are designed to be hung in the window and uh rack the light, but they've got that instead of being actual proper color changing crystal. Let me zoom down this.

[00:21:07]They've got a coating on them. They've had that uh sputtered coating put onto them that is nice enough. It's got the effect, but it's a dicroy type coating, but it's not the same as actual swarovski type crystal. But, you know, it's not bad. H what would happen if I reflected a light off this? I'll just change the lighting and you can see what that looks like.

[00:21:29]Okay, it's doing a dicroic effect. So, it is reflecting from one side, but also passing light through the other side, but the predominantly it's blues and greens. You're only really getting the the oranges and yellows when you actually shine the light through it. But it's still quite attractive. It's just a cheap bit of fun. Okay, watch your eyes.

[00:21:49]Oops, the light is about to come back.

[00:21:50]Let's say it be less trigger happy in the button there. I'm not sure if this is intended to be worn as a pendant. I thought it was for dangling your window.

[00:21:58]I think it is for dangling your window and uh letting air movement move around and look all sparkly and lovely. So anyway, sparkly crystals. Interesting, but not what I was expecting. I thought it was going to be actual like the the cut crystal type thing, but hey, it's fine.

[00:22:18]I'm not overdemanding that way. Okay, next thing.

[00:22:23]I've got a big chunky thing here.

[00:22:24]Actually, I've got a couple. Oh, and I've got Hell's Smoke, of course.

[00:22:30]Okay, let me let me just pause a moment.

[00:22:33]Uh, and I'll set this up.

[00:22:36]Okay, I think I'm ready to screw this demonstration up. Let's try it. So, you cut a bit of this special paper, and it's not that special. It's the paper they find on the side of boxes of the safety matches, but you cut a bit of it off and you get a nice chilled glass container.

[00:22:56]I'm going to just cut this to size. And you fold it with the brown side in the way, I think. Have I read instructions?

[00:23:05]No. Uh, then you light it. And what should happen is as it burns off, uh, lots of smoke up towards the camera.

[00:23:14]Lovely.

[00:23:15]But it should also, as well as putting lots of smoke up towards the camera. Let me zoom down this for maximum smoke.

[00:23:23]As it does this, it's also liberating a chemical onto the glass.

[00:23:33]Okay. So, now I'll just uh thought this bit through too well, did I? Off goes that. And there's the chemical there.

[00:23:41]Now, theoretically, I I'll use a black backdrop for this. I'll let the smoke clear cuz it's everywhere and that might affect the visibility. But if I have a black backdrop here and I put this on my fingers like this and then I rub them together, can you see the wisps of smoke coming off it? I don't know if you can really see that. I shall get change the lighting so you can see it.

[00:24:09]Rather worryingly, the smoke is coming off the f the fingers continuously, but when you rub it together, it should increase the amount of smoke comes off.

[00:24:17]Can you see that smoke billowing off the fingers there? Uh, very odd. It's to do with uh phosphorus. Probably quite nasty and toxic or something. Not really sure, but quite a nice visual effect. And as I say, you can do this with uh the strip on the side of a box of mattresses. Yet the fingers are just emitting smoke all the time. Now, just like when I'm doing electrical stuff. Okay, I shall go and wash this stuff off right now. One moment, please.

[00:24:47]Yeah, that didn't wash off too easy. I can see why they call it hell smoke now.

[00:24:50]But it's another trick. It's another fun thing. But now I'm wondering, can I strike? Is it literally just the same stuff? These matches are a bit damp probably cuz they've been around for a long time. What happens if I scrub this in there? Oh, uh, yeah, it's the same stuff. So, um ultimately, um you can use it through light matches as well.

[00:25:11]Lovely. That's useful to know. I shall put these through out the way.

[00:25:17]That might already be my favorite thing.

[00:25:19]Uh having washed the hands, there's still smoke me off fingers, though. So, that's that's quite worrying. These I wonder what the quality of these is.

[00:25:26]These are inrush limiting NDC thermisters. It says NDC 5D 15.

[00:25:34]Is that the the five is that the 5 ohms disc 15 mm diameter? Let's measure that.

[00:25:41]Let's bring in the calipers and uh measure the diameter. Is it 15 mm diameter? It's 14.6. Well, I'm not going to argue with that. The 5 ohms. Uh well, we can check that. Hold on. Where's the little jinky meter with the croc clips?

[00:25:58]Let's see how this goes. Let's see if I can make a dick of myself at live by measuring things and getting things wrong. 5 ohms, 5.5. I think I'm happy at 5.5.

[00:26:13]So, it starts off at that uh 5ish ohms at room temperature. This is a fairly warm room for for me. And uh when you power the load and the current flows through it once again, it heats up. But this time, as it heats up, the resistance goes down. So it just takes off that initial spike. It's useful for things like uh the inrush limiting to switch mode power supplies where the capacitor is fully discharged when you power up and therefore when you plug it in it limits the current through the rectifier and the charge current and protects the capacitor and the rectifier. But these things often they just split in half randomly. Um it's a common failure. If you open a piece of equipment and the little black thing is split in half like this, um it's probably the NTC thermister. You can either bridge it out or change it there. No. Also, the other things that split in half are the blue discs, the metal oxide aristers. Um when they split in half, it means they are actually across the main. So, don't bridge them out. Um but they can that can happen as well. Sometimes means there's been an overvoltage instant. This pretty sure I've looked at one of these before.

[00:27:24]It's a little disco light. Let's power up. Let's bring up the the tester. And here's the tester. Let's plug it in. Oh, it's a red one. Oh, it's color changing.

[00:27:36]Didn't know that.

[00:27:39]Okay. Uh 1.5 watt. That's quite high, is it not? Let me show you the display here. And here it is uh in the dark.

[00:27:48]It's actually going to swamp out now.

[00:27:51]That's interesting. It is projecting out quite a lot of light. I wonder what they're using in here. I thought that was just going to be a single color.

[00:27:58]Maybe I bought the multiolor one just to see what fancy circuitry they had. Um power factor 46. Not great. Little switch mode power supply. 12 milliamp 1.5 watt. Interesting. I have a slight urge to look inside this. Uh watch your eyes. The light is about to come back.

[00:28:18]So, I reckon it's all stuffed in from the front. I see a little ring here. Is it glued in? Am I going to stab myself?

[00:28:26]Probably. Um, is this total internal reflection lens going to come out? Yes.

[00:28:34]What's it going to reveal? It's going to reveal little power supply there. Is any of the circuitry in that? Yes, it must be because look at the number of wires going from it.

[00:28:45]um I can see uh let me just short this out.

[00:28:50]Um shorted I can see three little transistors here for red, green, and blue. I don't see the circuitry driving it. Where's that hiding? There it is.

[00:28:59]Oh, wow. Right. Tell you what, let me zoom down in this and bring it up to here and try and focus on it.

[00:29:09]Can you see I'm going to have to add a bit more light here. Can you see the little chip there?

[00:29:16]That chip there.

[00:29:21]Um, and then the three transistors driving the output with uh current limiting resistors probably. Lovely. Uh, that's interesting. Quite unexpected.

[00:29:29]Okay, let's focus back down onto here and zoom out a bit again.

[00:29:35]Right.

[00:29:37]And there is the little rubber grommet that was just not quite in the right position, but that's all right. This is more spiskin of thought. That may merit some reverse engineering. Interesting.

[00:29:49]So, we just shove that down there, which is how it goes in. And then just shove that in there. And that's its construction. Lovely. I'll stick it back in its little box.

[00:29:58]These things are shown, incidentally, in the listings like with a background of a big rock concert, and this is shown in the foreground as if you're getting a huge light, but in reality, it's just being shown somewhat out of perspective.

[00:30:11]But the color changer one, that's more sophisticated than I was expecting. I thought they were going to be cheating and use a little just a standard RGB self color changing LED.

[00:30:22]Run at low power. Okay, next up. Um, what about this or this? Uh, let's take a look at this.

[00:30:36]This will also require power cuz I kind of know what this is.

[00:30:42]Oh, it's a plastic housing. Oh, I have to pop the lid in that.

[00:30:48]Just put that out the way.

[00:30:53]The cardboard, I think, is just packaging.

[00:30:56]Uh, right. Tell you what, well, we can already see you can see the LEDs behind the lens on. Is it going to be a single-sided circuit board? We'll find out in due course. Uh, let's power it up. Uh, before we open it. Okay, I shall do that.

[00:31:12]So, let's grab the power supply here.

[00:31:15]Let's take it this is 240. We'll find out when I power up.

[00:31:19]I think it's 240. It might not be 240.

[00:31:22]It might be 12 volt. You all hope it is.

[00:31:26]Uh, this isn't going to be the best demonstration, but I shall plug it in.

[00:31:33]Nothing happened. That's a bit worrying, is it not? Uh, let's make sure these connections are properly made.

[00:31:45]Maybe it is 12 volt. I don't think it is.

[00:31:52]Any luck now? Yes, there it is. So, it's shooting beams out to the side. It is splashing light. It's a golden white light. Um, and it's uh shooting multiple beams. Lovely. Let's open it up. Uh, 6.8 watt. So about roughly give or take a bit losses 1 watt per LED perhaps.

[00:32:14]I'll put that down there and we shall apply the spudger. I've misplaced the spudger already. I mean seriously, how fast was that? What have I done with it?

[00:32:27]Uh anyway, let's just use this screwdriver then as in lie of the buzzer. Buzzer spudger. Same thing.

[00:32:35]Really? Not really.

[00:32:37]Oh, plasticky.

[00:32:40]I thought this was going to be metal, but hey, it's plastic. I guess that makes it safer. Little uh switching power supply with a little connector.

[00:32:48]That's nice. And then what do we have?

[00:32:50]We have the circuit boards are just jammed down perhaps. Oh, they are just jammed down into plastic housings.

[00:32:57]Lovely. Let me see if I can unjam one.

[00:33:01]There is a spot of what might be. That is glue. Boo. Ooh, they've glued them.

[00:33:06]Not that that's going to stop us if we just get in there and hike it.

[00:33:13]That's moving. Oh, they have glued along the full length. The bastards.

[00:33:20]Okay, it's moving. It's moving.

[00:33:27]Should I pause while I'm mutilating this light? Probably.

[00:33:33]It's not want to come out. As one end goes up, the other end goes down. That might be the fact that the LEDs are um pivoting. They're actually touching that. All right, I'll pause. One moment, please. Okay, so those great big LEDs are just 2835 type LEDs. They're tiny. H not much heat sinking. Uh this thing isn't going to last that long, is it? Um let's also just stick this spudger since I've now located it under here. I think these are glued in as well. Everything's glued.

[00:34:05]It's a disposable piece of plastic.

[00:34:09]It's coming out.

[00:34:11]Yeah. Plastic lens glued in with rubbery siliconey glue. And the circuit board literally just wedged down the back. And what was difficult taking that out is the LEDs were catching on the edge because uh it was just really tight fitting. That's horrible. But anyway, that's what you expect occasionally. Not totally recommend. I don't think that's going to last too long to be honest. Noble, but uh maybe usable for its little LED driver. Oh, let's pop that open. The spudger as well. We know what this is going to be.

[00:34:42]It's going to be the ones you find in the back of a GU10. Yeah, little dinky thing. Uh there's the capacitor. Yes, there's a little driver chip. Let's see if we can uh get a number off that.

[00:34:58]It's a very small number. Bright power 9511.

[00:35:05]MK. Is that right?

[00:35:10]It's not terribly clear. I think it's a bright power.

[00:35:15]Oh, it might be a DP9511 MK. DP9511 MK. H.

[00:35:24]Anyway, that's that. What's next? Well, it's the last thing actually.

[00:35:34]This says touch lights. Are they touch?

[00:35:35]Oh, they are touch. I thought they'd actually just It looked like there was a button in, but it's actually a little touch thing going through. I tell you what, let's get the uh USB power meter out and test that.

[00:35:47]So, the USB power meter, here's one here. Little pink USB power supply. Plug this in here.

[00:35:55]Zoom down a bit so you can actually see what it's saying.

[00:35:59]And we'll plug the warm white one in, which will look bright yellow. Oh, it's doublesided.

[00:36:07]Uh-huh.

[00:36:08]So, 48 milliamps.

[00:36:13]Is it going to get brighter?

[00:36:16]Oh, hold on. It's going up to 91 milliamps.

[00:36:22]So, one quick touch uh turns it on and off. And uh holding it makes it dim down and up. So the lowest it goes down to is uh 12 milliamps. Okay. And likewise, this one is just going to be the cold white version of that. I can see little Well, actually, I can see two chips. One of them will be the touch chip, and one of will be the microcontroller that's controlling it. And there's a transistor in there that uh is doing the switching of the power to LEDs most likely.

[00:36:51]Uh, okay. They all come set amid current 48. Uh, and again, this is going to go up to 92 and down to probably about 12 again.

[00:37:08]Yes, indeed. Okay. Interesting enough little lights.

[00:37:13]Can we get a closer look at the circuit board? Can we pop it? Pop it.

[00:37:21]sticky goo. I think that's off that thing.

[00:37:24]Uh, let's pop this apart.

[00:37:27]It's not popping apart terribly easy.

[00:37:29]Have they glued this or is it just clipped together? Uh, not sure.

[00:37:34]Are we going to learn much from this?

[00:37:36]Probably not. But that's okay. I'm going to open it anyway. Maybe I'm going to open it. It's not opening. It's It's resisting the One Moment, please.

[00:37:47]It is open. It took a lot of force. It wasn't glued. It's just super ultra squeaky tight compressed together with pins going into mating sockets here. Um, so we have the touch center chip there with a support components capacitors, a little resistor in line. We've got the end here with the metalized plastic just over the end of the circuit board pad there. And then we've got a microcontroller switching what looks like a little tiny MOSFET uh, which drives the LEDs. I guess these are probably the resistors for those LEDs.

[00:38:19]Uh, neat enough design. Interesting.

[00:38:22]Um, well engineered to actually go together that tightly. But there we have it. Let me just sort out what I think are my top picks of this particular unbagging.

[00:38:33]So, I'd say my least favorite thing, as you may have noticed, is this light, cuz it's just made too cheaply and it's a disposable item. Isn't going to last too long. Um, other than that, everything else is interesting. Uh, I don't know if you can really trust components like this. Ultimately, they're mass-produced.

[00:38:49]It's a standard component, the inrush limiter. The little tungsten light bulbs are kind of fun to have just because they're so tiny, 3 mm diameter light bulbs. Um, the read switch is fun. The um the little overcurren thermal fuses, the solid state ones, the self-resetting ones are good. Don't trust this. the little crimpon wires that insulation displacement quite like these definitely thought this was a lot of fun even the hell smoke even if it is not perhaps uh I don't know how safe that is certainly doesn't seem it seems very resonous um the little crystal things okay if that appeals to you uh interestingly these little step motors are always a joy because they're just so mass- prodduced and and so fun to use and so simple to use and then a couple of USB lights and uh that disco light thing which is interesting the construction and then this is worth taking a look at the ancel battery monitor but anyway uh a worthy collection of tat well worth taking a look