As it's the time of year for odd articles, I thought there may be some interest in this device:
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I took one apart, and was surprised by how well it was made, and how complex its design appeared to be. It is held together with screws rather than just plastic clips, and, in particular, it has plugs and sockets on the circuit board where I expected just soldered leads.
The photo at
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shows a disassembled view. The battery compartment is on the left; the aerosol can holder is on the right. It has variable timing (SW1) to set 5, 10, or 30 minute intervals, and SW2 allows instant use. When activated, the solenoid coil pushes on the aerosol for a fraction of a second to release the fragrance. The green led flashes once every few seconds to show the device is working. The black push switch connected to the "Enable" plug detects whether or not an aerosol can is present; if not, it turns the device off to save wasting the three AA batteries.
Both sides of the circuit board are shown. The large transistor is a B772; the diode next to it is probably a 1N5401 (the 4 is not visible). I would have thought that, for simplicity and economy, it would have just used something like a cmos 555, but the controlling timer chip appears to be specifically designed.
My guess is that this device is a bit like an inkjet printer - the cost of manufacture isn't far off the selling price, but the real money is in the consumables!
Looks like the controller IC is "chip on board" under that blob of goo. I'd guess yeah it's something specifically designed for the device, and then as you say the margins are so thin that actually paying to have the die put in a package with pins would cut in too much.
I have some Harbor Freight Tool "ultrasonic stain removers" needing disasse mbly. They're a couple of watts of ultrasound, just on the edge of being a ble to produce a water-mist effect on their steel tip. Haven't yet dared to hold one against my skin. Or teeth. (Also I see a "Tide Buzz" simila r device, many on ebay.)
Aha, here's a good one below on ebay, claims to DECARBONIZE your clothes!
Universal Ultrasonic Portaible Washing Machine VOLCANO SILVER 3 in 1
Decarbonized like Kai, the Divine Assassin in LEXX! Hmm, well high-power ultrasound definitely will *decarbonate*; taking all the fizz out of your pepsi in one big blast.
I heard about this years before Mentos and cola. An old physics-teaching d emo. Put plastic cola bottle in a 50-watt ultrasound cleaner. Hit the sw itch, it's like instantly injecting a pound of mentos. 30ft fountain jet. Pressure stays the same, but a billion microbubbles appear.
Diet coke works well. So does club soda with a drop of dish detergent. S o, I put it on youtube.
ULTRASONIC MAYHEM #1
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Unpublished footage mayhem #2 was well into my mad scientist phase, not jus t Unwise but outright Actionable.
On a sunny day (Fri, 25 Dec 2015 01:42:02 -0800 (PST)) it happened Bill Beaty wrote in :
Poor women :-)
I have put the ultrasonic anti-fouling setup aside for a wile, my ears needed several days to a week to recover from the previous range of tests. I need my ears...
Anyways maybe later on I have a whole range of tests that I want to run remote in an other room, with video camera setup. Wound the big transformer (output), heatsinks on MOSFETS, sure have enough power now. Got a suitable round jar for whatsit fusion bubbles or something, but the glass is thin, it may well break...
Amazing! So my analogy with inkjet printers was closer to the mark than I could ever have imagined. It just shows the sort of profits that the manufacturers make on the aerosols and the levels they will go to to protect them. These are sophisticated devices with very well designed and constructed circuitry.
From your article, it looks to be fairly easy to defeat the "DRM" but who amongst most users would even guess what was going on, let alone work out how to get round the problem. At the moment, there is no protection on UK devices as far as I can tell, but I haven't seen any generic aerosols.
It goes for coffee, too. Keurig DRM'd their coffeemaker so you had to buy their K-Cup "consumables".
Sure. If it gets 90% of the people it's a great "success" as long, of course, as you don't piss off too many people in the process. I doubt it's damaged the air-freshener business much. There are a lot of people who won't go near Keurig, though.
I only shot one video sequence. It works much better with a new unopened bottle of diet cola (not shown here, go try it yourself.)
This was experiment: test soda with detergent, also test the small-hole cap invention being sold in toy stores (does a larger hole give taller jet? O r only persists longer?)
But you have to open the bottle to add detergent; it starts effervescing aw ay the dissolved CO2 if you can't raise the pressure back up again. I didn 't mess with this further. But I could have added a dry ice chip to re-pr essurize.
No, I'm *testing* the nozzle cap used in all the mentos youtube demos.
If you've dared try the mentos, you know that the fountain effect is only 3 to 5 ft high. This caused some embarrassment at a local Maker space, when they performed this at a public show without any initial testing. Everybo dy stand back 20ft! Then, 2ft fountains.
"Nothing but diet coke and mentos" is not very honest. Eepybird used a ch eat.
Eepybird
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Blue man
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In the Eeepybird videos we couldn't see the size of their orifices! Your o rifice provided by nature is way too large apparently. Smaller is better, but only up to a point. Must design some sort of unnatural orifice plug t o increase your personal pressure during desired eruption. Testing neede d!
And as with all my videos, they must be unimpressive, or kids won't be infe cted with the experimental science bug. Vids instead must look incompetent , but only to a point. Kids must think: "That's stupid ...I COULD DO MUC H BETTER." Then they go and make a far, far better video than mine, and p erhaps independently discover several new hacks that I'd already found, but intentionally concealed.
I couldn't have staged that intentionally! And it's just blurred enough so nobody is recognized.
of tests.
A guy at our UW h.i.t. lab accidentally gave himself permanent tinnitus rin ging in one ear from trying to make a 30KHz beam gun, using an array of twe eter speakers. He was going to aim it at barking dogs next door, but zappe d himself instead. Ultrasound is nasty: permanent hearing loss from hairce ll damage.
I was once messing with a 40KHz transducer, only about a watt on the input, unknown output watts. After many minutes my ears started ringing. Like h aving been to a loud rock concert! VERY low wattage of fairly high ultraso und will destroy your hearing. I suspended the transducer in a sealed pean ut-butter jar, end of problem.
Just use yellow foam earplugs. Perhaps also include some old-style headph ones at the same time. Even though we cannot hear it, still it's destroyi ng our hearing.
ULTRASOUND TRIVIA: humans can hear frequencies well over 40KHz. But it only works if the signal is coupled underwater, or via bone conduction tran sducers. And it only works for modulated ultrasound, not CW. Our ultraso nic hearing channel is not through the tympanum, instead the otolith in the "utricle" becomes the transducer. Utricle contains a calcite grain Otoli th, and is the human lowpass balance organ (as opposed to semicirular canal s highpass "inertial guidance" organ.)
Very strange ...as if humans had lived underwater for a few million years. One crackpot says that during the JC Lilly dolphin project, he found that if you make a certain noise in your throat underwater, the sinus cavities behave as an acoustic lens, and a tight ultrasonic beam is sent out from yo ur forehead. This would have no purpose, even under water ...until very recent discovery of human basal-cochlear (utricle/saccule) ultrasound heari ng via water coupling to the head. Go build an underwater detector array, and try it in the swimming pool.
On a sunny day (Sat, 26 Dec 2015 15:00:18 -0800 (PST)) it happened Bill Beaty wrote in :
Even though we cannot hear it, still it's destroying our hearing.
I was under the impression that the ultrasonics were transmitted through the skull. I do have wax ear plugs, but not sure that helps. This was intended to keep a boat hull clean. After these experiments I think I will not use the system for that. Not only because of myself when diving, but also because of possible liability against others diving.
I gave this link before, scroll down for life experience while diving:
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I dunno about dolphins, somebody in a Dutch sailing forum reports Dolphins having fun around his boat with ultrasonic anti-fouling on. He reacted just bit 'too' aggressive when somebody pointed out it might be harmful to marine life, and he is a moderator... Suspect (financing site etc).
I am still curious if one could detect any neutron or other radiation from imploding bubbles in an fluid exited by ultrasound. but I do not HAVE to know it today :-)
I did do the 30 kHz or so with an array of 4 piezo horns many years ago to get rid of some nuisance lifeforms, seems little kids can hear it (above 20 kHz), 80 W into 4 horns... Audio amp. It works. I blew up the horns, had just little pieces of piezo in it like in a buzzer. these transducers I have now are rated for 60 W CW or so.
OTOH there is always some ringing going on, even in silence. I can hear from the that silent pitched 'tinnus' sound I hear how many human life forms are active in the area. I think I can detect life forms from far far away even before you can hear them 'normally'. But what I think is happening is some demodulation or superheterodyne in the human brain.
Brain waves are slightly off and differently modulated in each human. I look at it sometimes as SSB, get the right carrier and you can decode what the other sees (thinks, what the other's brain is processing). But I am way out of the normal scientific chatter here, but that is my experience. There must also be something as an absolute carrier and second medium where the acoustic impulse syncs the brain and then decodes that second channel.
One example is that where I used to live, near a bridge, cars would slow down, and I could see, if it was quiet, in my mind what the driver was thinking about. The de-acelleration 'waveform' being enough info to sync to the second channel whatever that is [1]. Sometimes I have thought that the second channel is information carried by particles that travel through us in all directions, like Le Sage particles that cause gravity, or more down to earth somebody will blabber about neutrinos, but I dunno enough about neutrinos and their interactions, but basically we would, with our brain be modulation the stream of particles (that pass through it in all directions), But hey 200 years ago radio was magic.. Nobody would believe an ipad, you'd be burned for witchcraft..;. So, anyways, these are my views, f*ck the pope. He is just a salesman. Hello?
[1] I did the bandwidth calculation once, and the base band is not enough for picture transmission, or is it (what do we know about compression, we have JUST been at it for a few years compared to the trillions of years of evolution [2]. Nothing we can discover that is not already there. [2] include before that big bang too.
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