sanding off chip markings?

Apparently, yes:

``A university professor used sandpaper to remove the logo markings from Motorola mobile phone chips and passed them off as his own invention. He got away with it for THREE YEARS and received millions of dollars in government funding!''

Hello Michael,

One of those little key-chain things? I tried one. Horrible RF performance, can't hold a tune in a bucket. I doubt it's worth taking apart (I didn't). Don't even know where I put it, not that I wanted to go looking for it.

Probably just a single-chip receiver. On mine it must have been a rather lousy one. The five-transistor FM radio I built as a kid was better.

A dental X-ray and some experience can eliminate a lot of this horseshit.

Not a problem....

All IC packaging moves to the place with lowest considerations about that sort of enronmental stuff.

If they half inch a couple of mill off the end of the line we're still quids in and you get a nice radio.

Cool

DNA

Yup, this one was pretty lousy. Has a "scan" button that gets confused sometimes and then doesn't scan anymore... at least, until you turn it off and back on...

But still, for 99 cents, I wasn't expecting an iPod... ;)

Hello Michael,

Mine was the same. Terrible. I wouldn't even want one of those for free.

I saw them in a grab box at one of the big stores. Still, $1 is too much money for something that is essentially worthless and would just take up space in some desk drawer ;-)

An intersting economic metric would be mean-time-to-landfill.

Hello Richard,

ROFL! That would be a cool new parameter for the post-RoHS era.

With stuff like this "radio" you couldn't really assess that time. People buy these because the deals sounds so enticing. A buck for a radio, wow. Then they'd fumble with it a bit, become frustrated, leave it somewhere and the next day they wouldn't remember where.

I must confess that I almost fell for it, for the same reason Michael did (to take it apart). Then my sister gave me one that she received as a freebie. So I could keep my buck plus tax ;-)

I first thought about this when cleaning the kids-meal toys out of the back of my car. I realized that many of them had been in the hands of the kids for perhaps an hour or less before being discarded. The image I have for the future is a large factory somewhere in the world whose production line feeds directly into a landfill pit, eleiminating all the cost and delay of worldwide shipment.

I combined two such items (an egg and the innards of a toy car with a super-bright LED in it) to make an erie looking floating battery-powered lamp. We sent it sailing out into the night fog over Lake Ontario. Probably in the belly of a fish or lamprey now.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

the back

the kids

have for

production line

delay of

It works in real life too:

ENRON managed to refine that business model to the point of actually producing nothing at all while transferring huge sums to management, cronies and shareholders wise enough to ditch the stock.

One should consider the similar opportunities presented by CO2 quotas ... the political system just created a new currency here.

Only by people that don't understand that it's a waste of time, as any reverse-engineer worth their salt will be able to figure out what the chip is in typically a few minutes.

devices like this are usually worth parts for the parts bin...If the chip was snaded clean, just toss it and cannibalise the rest for parts, although finding out what chip it is can be made simple by examining the pinout.....

reverse-engineer worth their

I knew a couple of guys who refused to put the pin numbers of simple commodity ICs like op-amps and comparators on their schematics. It used to drive me nuts. Their 'excuse' was that it made it harder to copy. Unbelievable stupidity.

Graham

I knew a company that did this, sanding of all the chips in their boards. Every regulator, op-amp, micro, everything. I thought it was just "cute paranoia". Later on I learned that that they had copied all their competitiors designs into their own. After that, I understood that they weren't worried about being copied, but that they'd be caught COPYING.

However, it must be a good business model, they are still going to this day, some time later, and growing. I guess having no development costs helps the bottom line!

reverse-engineer worth their

ICs like op-amps and

that it made it harder to

"Used to" drive you nuts?

Two additional reasons I bought it:

1. I thought it would be a lot lighter to carry on plane trips than my CD-MP3 player. Only later did I remember that it might cause interference with the aircraft navigation.

1. In case of a nuclear strike against us, or equivalent catastrophe, having a radio like this might come in handy. (Better than nothing at all.)

Michael

reverse-engineer worth their

If we're talking about those single IC FM radios that have two buttons to tune it, a "scan" and a "reset" button, it was easy when I looked.

I bought one out of curiosity, and when I saw no ceramic filter inside, it became clear that it was likely like the old tda7000 IC that converted down to the tens of KHz range for active filtering to work, But the pin count was wrong. I checked the Signetics website, and they pointed to variants of the original IC, and one of them matched the pin count and then I traced the circuit based on the assumption it was that IC, and there it was. I've posted about it, I can't recall the IC but it was something like "7088". In my case, the number hadn't been sanded off, but it was certainly difficult to read (maybe had bee only partially sanded, though it didn't look like it). Once I knew the IC, and a I looked at it again with a good flashlight, the correct number was legible.

Of course, it was easy since there was only one IC, and there are a limited number of those that could do the job. The more ICs, the more work tracing the circuit requires.

SOmeone suggested they were a source of parts. Unless you needed the specific IC, there isn't much in them. I could get more parts out of that older CD player I saw waiting for the garbage the other day (I guess my parts collection is fairly full, because I didn't even pull the transformer, but then I was carrying a boombox that I'd picked up further down the street), or that TV set circuit board I did bring home a few weeks ago (it was conveniently detached from the tv set, so I just had to pick up the board).

Michael

Hello Michael,

That would most likely bring the goons out. I doubt these things would be good in terms of EMI. Come to think of it, I don't even have an MP3 player. Now I am feeling old...

Mine almost would lose tune when one of our dogs sneezed. When walking through the hallway here it wasn't able to play the same station from one end to the other. Pathetic. I'd take a classy old 6-10 transistor AM radio. Much better and runs for days on normal batteries, not some boutique coin cells.