 Okay, hello, it is midnight somewhere in the world at least here. So we're doing a Put our kid to bed. So we're doing a midnight teardown of Her electronic toys because this is something that techie parents always say they're gonna do They're like, oh, I'm gonna hack it. So the music is lower or I'm gonna put my own stuff in there So we're actually gonna do it. So The toy that we're going to take apart tonight is from baby Einstein and it is called the take-along tunes This was recommended by a couple of people. They're like, oh, you should get this and you know, it has like one button placed on We'll show what it does Super cute. It does not play the cure or joy division. It just plays Play some classical music to an issue like people on YouTube are like, oh, here's the the songs and here's that next to small human hands Here's a quick video just so you can see what it does Okay, so what I don't quite understand now that I'm a connoisseur Or a collector of some of these toys is why isn't there like Like the tar hero has, you know slash some of and they have songs from musicians Why isn't there like, you know, baby toys with like you should think there should be like the Johnny Cash version I would like a Prince one. Okay Purple and stuff like that. So I think we're just gonna have to make them and that's fine So this is the first step of many. We have a little kicky piano So we'll do some Tori Amos with that But the other thing is it's all like lions and tigers and everything. I do that's fun But I do think there's more modern things that young people young young children might need to There's more yellow cabs than yellow lion. Yeah, you have to walk in this like hippo. It's like well watch out You know, you're gonna get you're more likely to get run over by You know an SUV, right? So This is the first of many we think and we've done teardowns before they're always popular This is the setup we're going with now each week when we do these or each day I don't know. What else are we gonna do at midnight when the kids asleep? We're gonna get more powerful optics. Oh, we're just gonna see how far we can push it This one's pretty easy. Lady is gonna dive right in we used to do teardowns all the time at a fruit Yeah, stop for a little bit, but we will get back into it Yeah, and I think that we'll be able to uncover some neat stuff One of the coolest things about the electronic toys is you can tell it is the absolute lowest cost way to go So you can learn a lot about but and there's one thing I mean low cost in bad way No, it's not that but no look you want to make it affordable so people can yeah and have it for their kids And if they break it's not the end of the world like six bucks or something, but what's neat is You know the enclosures are really durable because they're meant to be like it proof And so and they always have little battery cases that are like nice screwed closed So they actually make for excellent Yeah, well enclosures Oh paired to like like look you you get an iPad or you get like a modern cell phone like you can yeah Well, you're not yeah, and and there's a lot of space in here And for the folks that are gonna ask so the one of the ideas is we take the electronics out of these things We put in our own reference board that shows up as a Wi-Fi device you drag and drop your own Music on it and then you can do your own light show and you can update it over maybe there's SD card And it's all but it's still the same enclosure. It's still, you know, baby safe And so you just use that enclosure, but we want to reproduce the functionality. So this is just a start of this So let's dive right in we've got The device we're gonna do a little bit of a kick cooking show thing. So let's do the before well This is yes, this is the thing It says little sounds and then this actually does this has LEDs behind it will show you and this has you know It's like an iPod But it's really just a button when you press it So it's not actually for a different button now It's not four buttons and there's this It's not something that says either and then this is the battery case. It's all it does You just press a button and it goes to a different song One thing that I do say I like is that the baby Einstein stuff uses screws And they're all like really easy to open none of it is glued closed Why I find there's enough screws. Yeah, so That's kind of nice. Okay, so this is the outer enclosure So by the magic of I undid the four screws earlier today. Yeah, this is what it comes out to be Yeah, there's this plastic piece. I'll leave it on this and then tell me when you want to go to close Yeah, when we're getting close. So this is the plastic piece and here's another interesting thing Yeah, like I said, there's a lot of screws You'll see a lot of like little hex spots here And almost no glue and I think that's actually because it makes it it isn't much faster to manufacture If you don't have to wait for the glue to cure So I think they actually went with gluing and snap fitting as much as possible And this is the little button piece, but again, it's one button. It's not four buttons Even though it looks like it's four. It's it's our five And then like you're two month old. You don't know the difference. Yeah, they don't know They don't look at different capacity and resistive touch. Yeah. Well Okay, so this is uh, let me show that and we'll we'll zoom in in a minute So this is the main PCB. There's this on-off switch. Um, one nice detail is they put heat shrink Over the um terminals. Uh, this is actually pretty well made For Okay, so here, um, you can see it really good. So yeah, you see how this has heat shrink on it Um, that's not done in really cheap electronics. Usually so, um, it's like It's inexpensive, but it's well well made Um, and then down here you can see this is the speaker. We're actually basically stock this speaker This is like a half watt eight ohm speaker and you can see it's kind of a nice design because it's got the um I hit that hit the fix button. I'm gonna stay focus lock. Yeah We did that locker. Yeah, hold on We're still learning. Okay. So now it's locked. Okay. So now I can twist this. Um, So you can see I'll show later where these go and then here's that like I said a lot things are screwed and these are the little Hex nut holding plastic pieces So this is the button like I said, there's only one button and so it's you know, it's a magnetic Uh, non-magnetic. It's like a little conductive pill under a rubber gasket and this is not glued I believe this is just press fit in using a little This I didn't take a part ahead of time. So let's see. Yeah, this is just a little Um silicone piece and you see there's a little conductive pill And this is just uh traced traced on it's nice Enig coated which is uh fancy that's if there's no Yeah, yeah, the gold coat sort of last a while. Um, that's really nice. They could have gone with just a plain Uh, uh lead free hassle cover, but they didn't they didn't they did enig and it is we're haas here as you can see um the speaker connection another nice little detail see how they put the Uh solder mask here just gives it a little more separation and a little more protection For the practical traces so they don't lift Because this is a single sided board. It's a paper phenolic, which is not unreasonable, right? There's no reason for it to be double sided. Uh, it's just funny because it means like this power traces go all the way around Um, but the person designed this like they did a really good job. Like everything's labeled very nicely nice large pieces Um, this is the red green and blue led, you know, when you press the button It does that there's little slots. I'll call out questions. I'm sure if you're gonna ask So why wouldn't you just use like one neopixel like thing? It is just cheaper. I mean a neopixel even the cheapest of all the neopixels is maybe four cents in quantity This is a tenth or you know less of a cent these leds are probably cheap So you can't do as much with as far as controlling like fading or maybe stuff like that, but you can still Yeah, this can like fade on off, but it's like, you know, you just get one a ledie Like personally if I was going to redo this pcb I'd add like six neopixels because like I'm I'm luxury neopixel the other thing is, you know, this is obviously an epoxy blob. That's not unusual inside of here is is a little I don't know if it'll call it a microcontroller. You know, it's some kind of processor Um, I believe, you know, I've chatted with people. That's probably like a four eight bits Audio controller that you know, when you press the button, it has a little bit of wrong memory and it makes those Those tunes and they're programmed into a wrong chip Um, you can't just change the there's no like access to reprogram the songs. Why do they put up? I mean, you know, I know the answer is this but this is for for folks who are just getting interested Why would you put a blob of epoxy on here? Um, it's cheaper to just take the chip and just mount it directly to the pcb And you bond it onto the pcb and then you put a glob of epoxy It it saves you basically 10 cents, but 10 cents times millions. Yeah It's like standard issue kid toys. I think it's like, you know, six or seven bucks or like and it's you know It does it does make it more durable I mean like even if you spilled water Into this thing it would survive because you're not going to get water under like little Pins and then here's the the contacts. So this is um Speaker power And oh, right. So the speaker has um, there's low and high volume. Let's see if I could show Yeah, and then some of the kids toys they have you can barely see and the only thing that is a little bit annoying It's like the it's it's molded And not there's no paint so it's like you can kind of barely see there's a circle and this small speaker and a big speaker I have one of the toys with me now, but um, and they make these so some of the features are like Oh, you have three languages for the ones that talk. Yeah, and it's English Spanish and French, which is cool But no cling on no cling on but also um when we make our Hacked versions you'll be able to put whatever language you want because you're putting all the files on so basically it unlocks Um, the capability of a of a kid toy. It's always going to be updateable Yeah, maybe you know, maybe you want to learn three different One of the languages besides those maybe the other languages. Yeah. All right. So what else is on this thing Portuguese Um, so and then another thing is that the battery connector. So, you know, these these all run on AA batteries Which is smart because AA batteries can get rechargeables Um, and they're very they're plentiful. They're available everywhere. You know, they don't have built-in battery charging It's a lot safer. You know, whenever we did um kids project or wearables. I always try to you know To go with that layer AAA batteries people like oh, you should use lipos It's like well, you we're not going to do lipos charging on clothing and we have to keep saying it over and over Yeah, but I think folks are kind of cool about it now They're like oh because I'm doing costume is in like now I understand the the logic and wisdom and safety behind that Yes, and this this is soldered on and you can see it solders directly to the pcb also smart Designed so, you know, one of the things that we're going to have to do is um You might have to have boost converters because this chip is designed to run on Two volts, but some of our electronics is, you know, especially the neopixels actually I'm kind of surprised the green LED actually might be a There might be a little micro booster a switch cap in here That uh gives you a higher enough voltage to to run the blue led because if this is 2.4 volts It won't light up the blue any so you know what I bet these two capacitors here, maybe um our switch caps maybe Or there's something going on here that gives you that somehow boost the voltage up just a little bit just to drive the uh the green and um Blue leds one of the things that we thought would be neat is have an exact drop in sized replacement So you can always keep your existing functionalities, you know unscrew all this take it out put our board in Yeah, um our open source board and then you can you know connect to a wi-fi drag you drop some files on it Teach the kid how to do programming on it later What so we'll see it looks like that might be possible where we'll be able to measure this You will have to like you know desolder and resolder some of these connections But you know that could be a fun hacking thing and there's people who've like hacked Toys before yeah Midi jack out the side. Yeah, absolutely, you know, and that's another thing. It's like, you know, it's it's a great case Right do a circuit thing right like I wouldn't add I can't add more buttons like people Can you make this thing well not really because like I'm kind of stuck with the case design the other thing is, you know Not a dig at all the cute little cute little person But I want to paint this to make it a skull. Yeah, and so, you know, there's a lot of things I want to do to this Um, and I but you can't it wouldn't make sense to do that now and have the music Stay the same. Well, maybe I could I might be able to add four button I could see like maybe if I just put four buttons in yeah, we could put we can give We could have it like a little slider like that Okay, so what else is on uh, this is pretty much it. I mean like this is you know It's just like I just started looking at my basis for the first time. I'm looking at it Um, and how do they store the music on these things? This is it's in underneath this epoxy blob is a rom chip that has the music hard burned in So there's again like I said, there's no way to replace even if there was a like a debug port like you're not You yeah, they're not gonna burn didn't permanently Like etched into stone so you can't yeah have to basically it's not like that someone's posted these files up They've I guess done a really high quality recording you yeah, you can get the recording out by just um, you know Connecting the speaker output into a microphone through a resistor to protect your microphone So you don't end up that's fun blowing it out so you can get the digital signal out And then record it and then analog signal and you're in your recording digitally or is it? Yeah, it would be analog, but it's probably PWM So, you know, you're gonna get fairly good Like as long as you filter it you'll get because it's not like a microphone. It's actually just the audio going Yeah, not a mic. I mean you're tapping in directly the signal So you'll get you know very very good recording Um, but yeah, you're not you you can't Change, you know, you can't change it without basically changing the entire so what would be Or sorry, what is gonna be the first step with making our own version just popping this pcb off measuring it? Yeah, so you what you want to do is you know, you have to line up the Those little screw holes and like you know, there's a screw here I don't know maybe we'll scan it in when the scanner is identical The the ideal thing is if you have a flatbed scanner you take the pcb You put the you have to I have to unsodder it right and then you put it into a flatbed scanner and you scan it Um, and that just gives you like a really nice flat one-to-one reproduction And then you know, I would actually just take that image raster it To black and white and then like Literally imported into eagle cannon and just race it out. All right. When I do this Maybe we'll start a github repo and we'll just like here's the scan for someone else Like this little slot, you know, if you get it right, it'll snap in um And like, you know, if you want to reuse this button Also, like you need I I think I would like to reuse all of the mechanical stuff because it's been battle tested Yeah, by babies by babies But then yeah, you only need to at least desolder and you know, these are color coded. It's not too bad Oh, you know, it's funny. Here's this capacitor. You know, I bet this these um These caps These big caps these that's the switch. I bet that's a switch cap converter Yeah, yeah Because like why would you have three capacitors? It seems a lot. I think a voltage doubler or something If you want to show it on the other cam Tilted up that line. Yeah, that's very weird to have especially since they're 10 volts There's no reason to have a 10 volt capacitor on these. You should have like a three or six volt So it makes me think that there's a voltage doubler in here that takes the That's built in which makes sense right because people are going to put in like dying batteries You're gonna get two volts out of here. You need to boost this up to four I wonder how long the batteries last Probably a very long time. I mean like yeah, that'll be interesting when we do our tests So the other piece of this that I'm gonna ask is Um, we can use an rp2040. We can use a esp32 s2 Um d3 like what what chip what chip do you think we might we might use for our board? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, um You know, if there's no usb port we could cut a port, but I kind of like the idea of having it be Um, I don't know why if I you know, it's like you basically you have a you know 10 seconds to when you put for turn it on Or you know, you can use some hold the button or something Yeah, like if the button is like yeah button is held while you're turning it on press and hold the button Then it's in it goes into bootloader mode or something me files Um, and the only thing is though, you know that uses more power But you know, maybe if you only turn on the wi-fi during that The esp32 is a fairly low power chip the rp2040 would also be great Um, it doesn't have wi-fi access, but you know one thing is there's a lot of space here Like we might be able to have a pico Go like a pico w and so you could take advantage of like, you know, there's these low cost boards you would solder that in um, yeah, maybe maybe i'll have uh, you know in patria Do a 3d reproduction of this so people could have it as an enclosure for their projects Yeah, don't want to figure out how to fit stuff in. Okay. Well, that's our second you fit like, you know, much much larger stuff So, you know, I don't I don't know yet, but i'm thinking i'm thinking probably a esp32 s2 because it's a really it's a really stable one thing that's funny is the s2 does have a DAC output, but we like there's no dma to the DAC So it's not good for playing audio clips. So we might have to add um Look an i2s amplifier to get really good because I think you want really good quality audio That is one of the things that Children's toys are not known for yeah, like it would be really cool if his head like nice a nice ice, it's gonna drop alg worbus on My alg worbus files. Yeah on the other hand, we don't have I I think in Circuit python. I don't think we have mp3 playback for esp Um, I know there is an arduina. There is an arduina though. Yeah, or I can do wave. We can do wave. Yeah, so um Yeah, like I think and I can't get samdies. So it can't be samdies Yeah, I think one day in the future there might be like a kid toy development camp where parents Um, whether they're coding or using drag and drop Or you know no code and they're like this is the songs I want on it and this is the light patterns I want on it and they publish to the device and They get to almost like ringtones for their phones, but they're not specific songs for their kids I guess that a lot of this stuff is neat, but um I'm just not into The like elephants and lions and frogs. It's cool, you know, but it seems like there's there's um Other things that and there's just nothing out. There's not there's nothing like everyone just copies each other Like all the all the toys. They're all toys. It's very pretty to see the The evolution of like one person comes up with a kiki piano and then they all kind of yeah I got two different kiki pianos and they're basically identical. Yeah, and um, It's cool. Um, you know, it's consistent, but I feel like Kids have to keep up with the changing times and a lot of these things are getting a little dated I just think it would be great just to look whatever her favorite songs are you load them on and you can get you know people make like MIDI like they make like You know lyricalists You know like karaoke basically basically turns into a little karaoke machine Yeah, a little bit of belly a little bit of prince a little bit of cure That's that's her current playlist. I'm going to raise her to be totally unable to socially interact with girls her age Yeah, it's like she's she's like, I'm only listening to 80s music. Um, okay. Well, let's tear it down. So we'll be back with more of these and uh More optic equipment because I think we're going to be able to do this late at night. Yeah I think we have a good job here. Yeah, just good. All right. Thanks everybody. All right. Thank you