[Hunter’s] wife came home from her latest extreme couponing session with a handful of free Air Wick Odor Detect air fresheners, and since they had so many of the things sitting around, he was compelled to take one apart to see what makes them tick.

The casing was secured with melted snap tabs which had to be cut, making disassembly a one-way street. Once opened, he found a trio of white label AA cells and an ARNIE COMPACT3 ISS.4 controller board, complete with an epoxy-sealed microcontroller. A similarly branded sensor board was attached to the controller, and he spotted a solenoid with a built-in nozzle for spraying air freshener as well.

The sensor board piqued his curiosity the most, and after some research he’s pretty sure that the Air Wick uses an Applied Sensor VOC air quality module to get the job done. The tiny sensor uses a special substrate containing electrodes, which measure the resistance of the sensing layer while it is heated to upwards of 400° C.  A change in resistance lets the air freshener know that it’s time to handle the odoriferous emanations floating about.

Thanks to [Hunter] for taking the time to tear the Air Wick down and letting us know what’s inside!

Do you know how a modern hard drive works? If you don’t you should have a pretty good idea after watching this video. In only five minutes [Bill Hammack] manages to describe a hard drive in awesome detail without using any unnecessary scientific jargon.

The video teardown explains how the flying head “flies” how voice coil motors work and provides a basic introduction to how the binary data is stored and processed in the disk. The way the flying head maintains the miniscule distance from the plate is particularly clever. You may remember the LCD monitor teardown by the Engineer Guy, equally as detailed and interesting. The video after the break is definitely worth a watch.

[Gray] over at Geek Chique had a bit of an eBay mishap and was suddenly the proud owner of 16 Vocera B1000A badges. If you are not familiar, these badges are small, lightweight communications devices similar to the famous Star Trek communicator, which allow users to talk to other individuals via VOIP. He was working on getting the remaining badges up and running by reimplementing the server software, and figured that since one of the badges he purchased was not working, he might as well take it apart.

It took him awhile to get the well-made badges apart, requiring a rotary tool and some elbow grease to get the job done. Inside, he found that the device was split into two circuit boards, one being the “WiFi” board, and the other the “CPU” board. The WiFi board uses a Prism WiFi chipset, which was incredibly common at the time of construction. The CPU board sports small SRAM and flash chips as you would expect, with a Texas Instruments 5490A DSP running the show.

While it remains to be seen if tearing the device down helps [Gray] to get things up and running again, it never hurts to take a closer look to see what you are working with.

[ifixit] has apparently grown tired of tearing apart Apple’s latest gizmos, and their latest display of un-engineering has a decidedly more federal flair. You may have heard about Yasir Afifi’s discovery of a FBI-installed tracking device on his car back in October of last year. Apparently, the feds abandoned a similar device with activist Kathy Thomas. Wired magazine managed to get their hands on it, and gave it to ifixit to take apart. There’ve even posted a video.

The hardware itself isn’t that remarkable, it’s essentially a GPS receiver designed before the turn of the century paired with a short range wireless transceiver. The whole device is powered by a set of D-sized lithium-thionyl chloride batteries which should be enough juice to run the whole setup for another few decades–long enough to outlast any reasonable expectations of privacy, with freedom and justice for all.

[Hotsolder] encountered a bad encoder in his Rigol Oscilloscope, so he opened it up in order to replace the damaged part. According to him, it was quite an adventure, so he documented the disassembly and component swap for the benefit of anyone else out there that might have to do the same.

The teardown is in the form of a slideshow, which is available on his site. The images are all pretty well annotated, so you should be able to follow along quite easily if you happen to be tearing one apart yourself. There’s not a ton of exotic things to see inside the scope, it pretty much contains what you would expect to see if you cracked one open.

The encoder replacement went off without a hitch, and he even took pictures of the defective one to discuss how it works.

It’s definitely a quick and interesting read if you are simply curious about oscilloscopes, or if you happen to need to dismantle yours.

[Thanks, oakkar7]

The Nintendo 3DS has been out for a couple days now (in japan) and the folks over at [tech on] were nice enough to do a teardown. Besides all the regular teardown goodies you can also get a good look at the 3DS’ 3D screen with a microscope. Turns out its a parallax barrier display which means that there are slits on top of the LED array to create a 3D effect without the use of special glasses. The rest of the hardware seems pretty standard, running an ARM based processor with some DRAM and NAND flash. Apparently the 3DS didn’t get much of an upgrade (downgrade?) as far as DRM is concerned because there are already examples of the 3DS running pirated games using a R4 card on youtube.

[via engaget]

Before [Steve] realized that it didn’t play nice with his network, he dismantled his Energy Detective TED 5000-G to see what made the device tick. He put together a nice teardown with high-res pictures throughout.  Each component of the TED 5000-G is dissected, with the exception of the current transformers, which he claims are pretty boring anyhow.  The gateway module is particularly interesting as it contains both an Ethernet interface as well as a 802.15.4 radio for wireless communications.  While the device is still a bit expensive at the moment, the gateway module could be useful in projects requiring PLC or ZigBee communications some time down the road, once prices ease a little.

[Jeri Ellsworth] is at it again, this time she takes apart a hot wheels speed gun and in the process she does a good job of  explaining how radar can be used to measure speed.  She also demonstrates a way to determine if an object is approaching or receding from the radar gun.

The Doppler shift is one way to remotely measure the speed of an object. It works by measuring the change in frequency of a wave after it strikes an object. Rather than measuring the Doppler shift of the returning wave most radar guns use the phase shift. The reason is that the frequency shift of a relativly slow object (60mph), to a relitivly high frequency signal(10GHz) is small (about 0.893Hz), where the phase shift varies based on the distance of the object.  This is all just a stepping stone in her quest to build a crude TSA body scanner.

[Dave] over at the EEVblog did a review of the kindle 3 recently, but never got to the good stuff, the guts.  He is now rectifying this with a full video dissection of the eReader. Full of details on how to open it up as well as specifics on the internals, this is a fun video to watch. One thing that caught our attention was the RFID tag on the inside of the case.  It is probably for inventory tracking, but we can’t help but have a few tinfoil hat type thoughts. You can watch the video after the break.

[thanks Julius]

Last Friday we looked at Wild Planet’s Spy Video TRAKR programmable RC vehicle mostly from an end user perspective. Much of our weekend was spent dismantling and photographing the device’s internal works, and poring over code and documentation, in order to better gauge the TRAKR’s true hackability. Our prior review included some erroneous speculation…we can clarify a number of details now, and forge ahead with entirely new erroneous speculation!

Our plan with this teardown is to establish more concrete details of what’s hackable inside the device, what’s not, and to help nail down some of the unstated hardware specifications.

We incorrectly reported that no programming documentation or compiler is yet available. Turns out all this information was simply tucked away in a help section of the TRAKR web site, not on the “App BUILDR” page where we expected it. Derp! These resources are still in a rough state, yet proved to be a far more valuable source of information than the physical teardown. C code and PDFs aren’t very photogenic though, so we’ve got plenty of circuit board pr0n to start with!

Inside the Remote

The concealed rear USB port was mentioned last time, which we’ve been informed is to allow for field-upgradeable firmware. If you don’t mind being tethered to one spot, we discovered the remote can also be powered from a USB hub, or even from the TRAKR’s own USB host port.

In another nod to tinkerer-friendly design, both the remote and the TRAKR are held together with identical Phillips screws throughout, recessed but not hidden under stickers or rubber pads.

The LCD screen is one typically seen in cell phones, 15-bit color at 160×120 pixels.

The remote and TRAKR have outwardly-identical radio transceivers. They’re rather well-sealed and we’ve not dismantled them further yet, but recall hearing they’re based on a Nordic 2.4 GHz part. Wild Planet claims that with a forthcoming firmware change, they’ll be WiFi-capable. We remain hopeful but skeptical — it seems far more likely that the remote’s rear USB port will come into play, or in the interim perhaps one of the SparkFun Nordic options will prove a viable choice for PC control.

Inside the TRAKR

Removing the screws is straightforward, but fully removing the lid from the TRAKR requires several cables be detached first — and they’ve all been glued in place for reliability. We just cut through the glue with an X-acto knife and pried a bit, but maybe it can be more delicately dissolved or melted.

The right side of the main board (turned sideways here) focuses on connectivity and the CPU. The ribbon cable at left leads to the camera. The pair of two-pin headers lead to the microphone and front accessory bump switch. The purpose of the unpopulated SW1 isn’t known — it might be that early designs featured an additional rear or top switch, now vestigial. The larger headers lead to the radio module and the trim pots and recessed reset/debug switches on the bot’s undercarriage.

No need to get through that epoxy blob. Digging through configuration files for the compiler, the chip appears to be a Nuvoton W55VA91, featuring an ARM926EJ core running at 192 MHz, and hardware-assisted JPEG codec.

Little to see on the underside. Another inactive V0_TVOUT pad taunts us! This side is dominated mostly by the SD card socket, and…

The USB host port is on a small daughter board, and each of the motors has some local driver circuitry as well.

Each motor is driven through a reduction gearbox. They operate quietly with only a slight amount of slop. As with the radio, we’ve not further dismantled these yet.

Though not powered, the front wheels aren’t as boring as we first thought. This rack and spring mechanism keeps a constant tension on the rubber tread belts, allowing them to flex and maintain traction as the TRAKR drives over various terrain.

The partly-disassembled camera pivot mechanism. Two small rubber pads provide just enough friction to hold the camera in its set position, yet still allow it to pivot easily. If attempting to add servo control to the camera, removing those pads will likely help.

Extracting the camera PCB from its housing, we were greeted with a low-hanging hack opportunity: the board was designed to accommodate multiple LEDs, but in practice shipped with just one large one in place. Boosting the light output should be a very simple matter of adding the missing resistors and LEDs, though you’ll need to drill holes through the case or run wires to mount the LEDs externally.

We’re not 100% certain of the camera sensor yet. From PR materials at Maker Faire, we know it’s from OmniVision, but don’t know the exact model. Based on size and specifications, the OV7670 looks like a possibility, in which case it should be capable of full VGA resolution, not just the QVGA output we’ve seen.

The “accessory port” is just a passive attachment point to clip things on; it resembles a headphone jack, but isn’t. There is a pushbutton switch behind it, maybe an interactive cat-poking stick is planned.

The artist’s signature.

Reassembly was straightforward. Cable connectors are keyed for orientation, and for those that aren’t a unique size, the correct positions can be inferred from cable length. And there was no mysterious “extra screw” at the end — everything went together easily and worked on the first try.

Passengers

Arduino, natch. Small devices like this can be powered from the TRAKR’s USB host port, but without an FTDI driver on the host side this connection can’t be used for serial communication.

Half-size and quarter-size breadboards fit exceedingly well, almost snapping into place. But anything placed back here though is going to block access to the SD and USB ports.

More Hack Ideas

Having explored the hardware inside and out, we’re already ruminating on the possibilities…

The TRAKR has a big infrared LED on the front (with two more easily added). The firmware for TV-B-Gone is open source. Enough said.

With the transport deck removed, the rear wheels of the TRAKR protrude slightly behind the body. With the addition of a gyro sensor, will it be possible to get the TRAKR to stand upright and scoot around Segway-style? The remote’s joysticks are non-proportional, but software control of the motors allows for very fine speed adjustment. It’s been done with LEGO NXT, so we think the practicality of this idea will come down to the responsiveness of the TRAKR’s motors. (Yes, we know it’s just propped up against the back wall there. Shhh!)

iFixit traveled all the way to Japan to bring you this iPhone 4 teardown, only to be shipped the device unexpectedly two days early!

We were surprised that the A4 processor (its naked body displayed for the world this past April) contained within the iPhone 4 had 512MB of ram, compared to the 256MB of the iPad. Other features include the 1420mAh battery (201mAh more than the 3Gs), 5MP rear camera and front VGA camera, and the use of micro-sim.

Frankly, we don’t see ourselves getting the device immediately, but how excited are you for the iPhone 4?

Ever wondered how expensive versus cheap multimeters hold up to abuse? [Dave] gives us a pretty good idea by, well, blowing them up. He’s using a capacitor bank to put roughly 4.2 KiloVolts into the poor little meters. If you absolutely must skip to the multimeters, go to about 5:00. You really will miss out on some good stuff though.

[via HackedGadgets]

Sure, tearing down devices to see what components are in there is fun. But tearing down the components themselves is even more fun. iFixit sent off their iPad guts to be laid bare after they were done with their iPad teardown. We’ve seen pictures of stripped chips in the past, but the work that Chipworks is doing for iFixit is quite amazing. Get the skinny on just about every part in there from the package markings and the die photos provided in their analysis.

The iPad has already been rooted, but you never know what power can be unlocked if you know what you’re working with. We’re thinking of the 50MHz to 100Mhz oscilloscope hack.

Its been quite a while since we’ve featured something from iFixit. But when we saw they had torn apart the next greatest Apple product, the iPad – released today, and how everyone on our team loves it, we thought why not also let our user base enjoy the destruction informative teardown as well.

In both the original and the FCC teardown, we see some awesome features and tricks Apple implemented. Most notably the two separate 3.75V lithium polymer cells, not soldered to the motherboard, allowing users to easily replace the battery if need be. However, in the opposite respect, more components than ever are being epoxied to the board, making the iPad much more rugged.

We’re left wondering, with everyone able to see the beautiful insides, does it change anyone’s mind on getting an iPad? Or would you rather make your own?

With the release of Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver shoppers were also given a device called the PokéWalker. A pedometer that helps your pocket monster gain experience and affection towards you. Here is a tear-down of the device next to Nintendo’s other try at getting children active, the Activity Meter pedometer. [Thanks Arty2]

Sega, while in todays day all we see is more and more rip offs of everyone’s favorite Hedgehog, we do remember a time when you brought more to the game field, especially with your advanced consoles. It does bring a tear to our eyes seeing this beast being torn apart, but its all for the best.

Those keeping up with Nintendo’s DS series will notice one thing, the console keeps getting smaller and smaller. That trend continued until the (Japan) release of the DSi LL. Some think its size can be attributed to an easier to see screen, others feel its jam-packed with more features. Make your own decision after seeing its tear-down. [via engadget]

Finally, we couldn’t decide what a fourth tear down should be, and couldn’t just leave with only three. So how about 10 separate Sony gadgets torn apart!