[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.

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?

Ah, the heady aroma of damp engineers! It’s raining in Silicon Valley, where the 2010 Embedded Systems Conference is getting off the ground at San Jose’s McEnery Convention Center.

ESC is primarily an industry event. In the past there’s been some lighter fare such as Parallax, Inc. representing the hobbyist market and giant robot giraffes walking the expo. With the economy now turned sour, the show floor lately is just a bit smaller and the focus more businesslike. Still, nestled between components intended to sell by the millions and oscilloscopes costing more than some cars, one can still find a few nifty technology products well within the budget of most Hack a Day readers, along with a few good classic hacks and tech demos…

(Is that a promise or a threat?)

First order of business was to follow up on a couple of products we’ve covered in the recent past…

We reviewed NXP’s mbed prototyping platform in November of last year. While there’s no stunning new revision, the good news is that the mbed community is going strong and economies of scale have made it possible to trim the starter kit price from $99 back down to the original early adopter cost of $59.

Additionally, they’ve thrown together a project in just a few days to demonstrate the prototyping ease of the mbed platform. Reading like a checklist of Hack a Day clichés, the demo brings together Twitter, the Logo programming language, live web streaming, servos and an Etch-a-Sketch. You can read more on the mbed blog, or watch the live stream and participate during ESC show hours.

We also liked this little breakout board which adds the most essential interfaces to mbed: MicroSD, Ethernet and USB host & client. This was something quickly made for an mbed workshop, and while there are no plans to officially productize it, we’re told the unpopulated board might be available through SparkFun’s BatchPCB service in the future.

Many readers were put off by the web-centric development approach used by mbed, as well as the lack of a debugger. Another NXP entry-level evaluation product called the LPCXpresso provides an affordable ARM development kit from a more traditional angle.

The $30 LPCXpresso boards are available in Cortex-M0 or -M3 varieties and include an integrated JTAG debugger. The downloadable Windows development environment is based around the Eclipse IDE and GNU toolchain. With headers installed the LPCXpresso is breadboard-friendly and in fact shares the same pinout as mbed, so there’s an existing ecosystem of hardware to work from.

STMicroelectronics’ STM8S-Discovery made a huge impact when we mentioned this $7 kit in November, clearing out distributors in a matter of days. At ESC, ST was showing their new ultra-low-power 8- and 32-bit MCUs with demos powered by a cactus (a variation on the classic lemon battery), a cup of warm water sitting atop a Peltier junction, and a modest induction charger. (What, no wind power?)

A new version on the STM8S-Discovery based on the new lower-power chip should be available within a couple of months, and is expected to be similarly affordable.

(Left: the original STM8S kit that created the ruckus. Right: the forthcoming STM8L kit.)

At the Texas Instruments booth, the BeagleBoard XM was being demonstrated, which improves upon its predecessor in nearly every regard.

We’re told BeagleBoard XM stands for “extra MIPS,” “extra memory,” (and “extra money,” they joked). The XM does not replace the original BeagleBoard, but will be sold alongside it at a premium price of $179 when it ships in June. The XM includes a faster processor (1 GHz), more RAM (512 MB, and a 1GB model may be forthcoming), Ethernet, more USB ports and improved power protection. The NAND flash is gone, replaced by a MicroSD slot on the underside. The new board is slightly larger but retains the same mounting holes, so it may fit as an upgrade into some existing BeagleBoard projects.

Microchip’s iPod/iPhone accessory development boards that we mentioned last month were on display. Unfortunately it appears one must be signed on with Apple’s “Made for iPod” developer program before these kits can even be ordered from Microchip, which really puts a damper on the fun for anyone who might just want to tinker.

Drifting further from product specifics and more into hacks and eye candy…

Product teardowns have become a staple of tech culture. “Zero-day” and live blog teardowns of new products are particularly exciting. ESC’s gone one better, making a show of ripping into a product (if a rather esoteric one) months before its official release: a high-end Zircon AC wire detector built around a Microchip dsPIC and a bevy of e-field sensors. It’s like engineer pr0n!

National Instruments certainly had one of the most entertaining booths at the event. Rather than passively showing dry PowerPoint summaries and monitors running LabVIEW (their graphical programming environment for engineers and scientists), they instead presented physical demos and projects making use of the software. Some serious, others not-so-serious. Hacks!

Remember Waterloo Labs’ iPhone-controlled car hack? There it is! Rather, there it is minus the actual car, but with all the essential parts nicely laid out where we can observe the rig in action. At the other end of the booth, one can challenge “RockBot” to a round of Frets on Fire, not unlike prior hacks we’ve seen.

Hack a Day readers might be familiar with Digi International for their XBee wireless modules, such as used in Adafruit’s Tweet-a-Watt power monitor. Easily distracted by shiny things, we were initially smitten with this addressable LED matrix wrapped around their booth; not a product, just something to catch peoples’ interest:

As it turns out, there’s an added bonus hack behind the hack. Most of Digi’s booth displays could be controlled and monitored using their own custom web apps, so it was a simple matter of walking around with an iPod touch to run the show:

At the ARM pavilion, this “Speedcuber” was solving Rubik’s cubes in under half a minute. The camera and puzzle-solving logic comes from a Motorola Droid. Commands are issued over Bluetooth to a pair of LEGO Mindstorms NXT controllers to drive the motors that manipulate the cube.

Macraigor Systems produces a line of JTAG debuggers…but to be honest, we (and pretty much everyone else passing the booth) nearly missed that fact, as we were all so distracted by their demo application involving one spectacular and elegant Intel hexapod robot:

We similarly fanboyed over Cryptography Research’s German Enigma cipher machine, as it was our first time seeing one not under lock and key in a glass museum case:

ESC Silicon Valley runs through Thursday, April 29th, and last we checked one could still register for a free exhibits-only pass on the ESC web site.

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?

The refreshed MacBook holds few surprises, resembling a Star Trek teleportation mix-up between the prior 13″ white MacBook and the current 13″ MacBook Pro. It retains a white polycarbonate case much like its predecessor while adopting a subset of the Pro’s components — CPU and GPU, glass trackpad, Mini DisplayPort, and the long-lived but sealed battery. Internally the system is still a maze of different-sized Torx, Phillips and tri-wing screws, but they do report this latest revision to be easier to dismantle for repair.

More novel inside and out is the new Magic Mouse, which early reports suggest may finally redeem Apple’s eleven year train wreck of mice. There’s not much to see on the bottom half — it’s a typical wireless mouse consisting of batteries, laser tracker and a Bluetooth chip. The top is something to behold though, with nearly the entire surface encrusted in capacitive sensors capable of gestural input. It resembles a miniature version of this electrostatic interface we saw in April.

No teardowns of the new iMacs, Mac mini or Time Capsule have taken place yet, but it’s surely just a matter of time. Even Velociraptors need to eat and sleep.

Update: 27″ iMac teardown added. Rawr!

Earlier this year, Nikon released the Coolpix S1000pj, a 12 megapixel point and shoot with the usual features, including image stabilization, face recognition, etc. However, the S1000pj features a built in projector into the usual diminutive point and shoot footprint, and also comes with a remote for controlling the projector in display mode, or for remote shooting. iFixit has gotten a hold of the unit, and detailed the difficult teardown process, which included component desoldering to get the extremely compact system completely apart. It is also interesting to compare this setup to other stand alone pico-projectors we have covered.

Not due to be released until the beginning of October, a PSP Go demo unit (shipped to G4TV) has already earned itself a teardown from [iFixit]. Among what was discovered:

- Once a few screws are removed, the battery is user replaceable (as-in: no soldering iron required)

- Wireless connectivity is only supplied through a 802.11b chip (no update to ‘n’, or even ‘g’, by Sony)

- Almost all chips are EMI-shielded (making them a bit more annoying to get to)

With a cheaper version of the PS3 ready to hit shelves, one can only wonder whether the relatively high price tag on this new PSP is worth it.

Update: It seems as though no party involved wanted the info leaked this early, which explains why the video and picture gallaries (up courtesy of Google) have been removed.

Update 2: The article (linked above) and video are now available. An explanation on why Sony had them remove the items for quite some time (plus some repair manuals) was posted by iFixit.

Our friends over at ifixit are at it again, how they get these devices so early before release and make a complete teardown in time still amazes us. Today they bring us the latest Microsoft media device, the Zune HD. Some features worth mentioning: The astoundingly thin, 1mm we’re talking, OLED screen. The Nvidia Tegra 2600 processor, hinting at 3D game capability. And finally who could forget the 660 mAh battery. But isn’t that 129 mAh less than the iPod touch? Microsoft’s reply, supposedly the Zune HD is using many more low power hardware solutions in this device. Either way, the competition is on, who will be the victor?

The new PS3 Slim has just been released, and ifixit has already posted a teardown. First, they easily removed the included 120GB hard drive, suggesting that upgrading it  shouldn’t be too hard. In order to get inside the cover, however, they needed to use a security Torx screwdriver. In the end, the Blu-ray drive turned out to be the bulkiest component, followed by some surprisingly gigantic fans. Hopefully this means that Sony won’t have to deal with overheating issues.

Related: Nintendo DSi Teardown

Photos of the BlackBerry Storm 2, both inside and out, have been leaked. Engadget provides us with the specifics, going into detail about the four large piezoelectric pressure sensors that sit underneath the screen. It looks as though the screen will still function as a button, just without the physical movement of the previous model that received mixed reviews. For a better explanation of the technology behind the phone’s innovative screen, here’s a video describing it in more detail and a writeup over at the CrackBerry forums.

iFixit has done a tear down on the symbolic do-it-yourself Espresso machine, the Starbucks Barista. Believe it or not, there is not a single circuit board in the works. There doesn’t seem to be much to the Barista; A few switches, some solenoids, a heater, and one way spring valve among other things. The assembly of the device is very simple. It is noted that in a pinch it may be torn down with a pair of pliers and washer; in place of a flat head screw driver. We have pondered the possibilities of this machine numerous times, while enjoying a cup of cappuccino. Though most conversations end at the bottom of the cup, many survive such as this Silvia PID looped expresso machine. The very name “Mecha turbo crazy coffee roaster” seems to encapsulate the effects of caffeine quite adequately.