 We picked this up for our kiddo And these are everywhere. They're like low-cost and it's a mimic cactus Yeah, why don't you do a little demo and I'm then I'm gonna show some footage with our with our kiddo Hi cactus. Hello. Yeah And it plays music and all that stuff, but here's the main use of it and I'll just show what this is what That's it with babies All right, so since we've had a kid. We're taking apart all the toys. We're also thinking of ways to make things better We're also thinking of things like well, you know chat GPT generates tons of fictional fun stories great. Let's have Toys plugged into that. That's kind of funny But we thought there wasn't really any good teardowns There's a lot of people who are just like look here's a chip on it But we I thought it'd be fun to have Lady Aida Show how this thing works and then as part of our show show if you wanted to make something like this What you would do and where you would find the parts? So let's do I think the only live teardown cactus teardown Cactus teardown. Well. Yeah, only one cactus was harmed in this. Yes. This guy lives. All right, so over it Okay, so going to the overhead We skin the cactus Show the This is the box. Yeah, this is the skin. So we've de-skinned the cactus Which is again green but you You can't You took it it's it's got polyfilm in it And we pulled it out and so it's it's just a fabric II Cover and then you know where this the stickers are there's just like these stickers. It's it's where the buttons are I'm not sure you want me then we took out the one one part of the plastic. There's the plastic base Which is two two parts that are screwed together And then we get to you To the actual electronics part so here. Okay, so we've got a Couple couple pieces here. So one is the part that rotates To dance the cactus. So it's just a you know a piece of plastic that's Bent around and so it's exciting so it'll and it's got it's like this cheap tubing on it So that when it rotates, you know, it will kind of like swirls around looks like it's dancing and then this is Low-cost fairy lights. So we actually have these in the shop. They're kind of cool So these are meant for like florists and stuff, but there's a really inexpensive way to add lighting. So They can be individual colors. So it by the way, there's like, you know All the cacti's are just slightly different. They're like probably multiple factories making knockoff and the knockoffs of the cactuses This one uses the fairy lights. I think it's just white white LEDs and then These are enameled wires that the LEDs are bonded to and then there's just a little dot of epoxy These are like super super cheap. So it is it's not a bad way to and they're cool So it's not a bad like you could use them with the poly-filled, you don't have to worry about it catching on fire Not that I guarantees will catch on fire and then underneath here is the battery pack Right so runs on three double a batteries and then here's the electronics. There's a lot of wires. So Hold on me D wire a five this okay, so this is the LED so the LEDs Are connected to like just a GPIO and they're turned on the flashed. There's the motor the motor is a You know, it's a DC motor, you know, 4.5 volt 3 volt motor and then it's got a Belt to this gear train and that just slows it down a lot. This is like a 3,000 rpm motor. Here's an on-off switch Which goes in here and then We've got the speaker driver right because these two wires are the speaker Well, let me feel like this kind of got a little bit Twisted around I don't know if I can untwist this Okay, so These are the two buttons, so there's like two like record playback type buttons There's a speaker. It looks like probably just an 8 ohm quarter watt speaker connected over here And then here's the circuitry board and what I like is that it's you know It's a paper phenolic single-sided and so you get to have a really cool layout Like it's a really beautiful layout because they have to figure out how to get you know the ground all the way around So I think like this the ground plane is like the ground out our ring basically and then we're gonna zoom in And then we're gonna focus in on this, okay, so this is the Circuit and what do you see is that there's actually there's not a lot going on here? For example, there's no regulator, right? So the power goes straight in from the battery, which is This black line and this red line and then this blue line No, sorry. That's the motor the green Line here. So this green line You know, there's a little capacitor here. Sorry this green line is power in there's a little capacitor But otherwise, you know it pretty much just powers all the circuitry directly Save 10 cents don't need a regulator to need like one or two capacitors and then this is The motor driver, I think blue. Yes. This is a motor driver. So the motor driver It doesn't have a built-in motor drive. So there is a transistor here. It's a very simple MOSFET you know, it's a little sock 89 I think MOSFET to turn on the motor turn off you don't need an H bridge because you can spin one to which normally and Then how there's like one capacitor one resistor here just for the actually this is probably a BJT not a Not a MOSFET because there's a inline hundred ohm resistor and then These are the this is the wires to the LEDs these enamel wires this yellow set is The speaker so you can see here is because they go directly into Both of them go directly in and there's no amplifier. This is a chip that has a built-in Class AB or class D amplifier that can drive an eight-ohm speaker. So this is a specialized audio chip already I'm like, okay, this is a chip that does audio specifically because to have a built-in class D or class AB as speaker driver for an eight watt That's eight ohm quarter watt speaker and then also the microphone as well As you can see here, there's a microphone. This looks like there's a capacitive Bias to it maybe not exactly sure. I thought it was a lectret But no, I'm not I mean, I guess it could be a lectret that may be surface mounted or wave saw it on Unclear and then this the microphone also goes in directly into the Chip so that means it has a built-in microphone amplifier There's a second chip here and normally you would be like, oh, you know, this chip is like a You know, it's that's the audio amplifier, right? It's actually not this is a flash chip and the reason you can tell is It's got see it's got the T 25s 80 25x number number is Nor flash right you've got the W25 q16 that's what we use 25s 80 is going to be plain SPI. It doesn't it doesn't have the q right? So it's probably plain SPI not quad spy very very low-cost 80 8 megabit probably flash so this is probably where the memory is stored So this chip has the program memory stored externally probably I don't think that this is the audio Orange because it doesn't make It doesn't make a lot of sense to spend money on SPI flash to store the audio in but it could be that it stores, you know, it could be that you record It it can use half of this for flash memory and half of it for The audio recording in playback. So there's this finally it's like, okay, we looked at everything on the board There's no LDL. There's the motor driver. There's flash memory and you if you google this number, you'll find the data sheet for this It's just a low-cost Flash memory chips and then finally there's this there's a mystery chip, right? It's got this cool logo It's just like a jl, but it looks like a pie symbol And then the part number is a a b2 to bp 00 521 which You know, and then there's there's some deeds here, but they're not you are useful So I was like, well, you know, it's it's it's Clearly not an american chip. It's it's probably a chinese Chip designed for, you know, these very low-cost audio playback projects. So I thought We could quickly it was like, well, I might as well google for it. So what I did is go to the computer Thank you, uh, I just google for the first so sometimes, you know, the secondary digits are Specifications like how much ram they have or like the speed. So I just searched for the first Couple characters. I didn't find you know, there's nothing with that particular Um part number, but you know, a lot of the chips look similar And one thing that I do know is that you'll often see like rebrands Like there'll be one chip core and then they'll they'll tweak it for a customer. So customers like look You know, I need this audio playback chip, but I want it to have You know more ram or less ram or I want you to Do something tweaky with the peripherals or give me a more powerful Amplifier or bond in something on the chip. Who knows so Um, well, I did find I did not find that part number. Um, I did find chips that had the same Uh Logo, which was helpful, right because I was like, I never I don't recognize this logo and this logo is for Yeah, so I like googled and like I found it here and then I was like, okay here and then it was like jerry Uh brand chip Or jl jerry, so it makes sense right because it looks a little bit like a j and l Um, and they make bluetooth audio chips and then they make also usb This is spi flash music player. So like very similar stuff um I did find they have a github. So they're called jaly. So jerry jaly um And they have bluetooth sdk. So they make microcontrollers very inexpensive microcontrollers Probably based on the 8051, uh, maybe some whisk 5 nowadays Uh, there's some documentation For the other chips, uh, like the ac 10 82 Everything playback chips looks like they're do knockoffs of the wt uh 8002 series. So um For those who don't know about it Sound ic they they make also very similar Low cost, you know voice recorder chips um mp3 playback, you know type chips for for Audio recording audio playback audio control whatever But this is definitely, you know, they have an sdk. I thought it was cool. And it was like this is they have open source documentation. Um It doesn't mean it's great, but it's open source Either my controller you can program it. So this is probably, you know, they somebody took the example of like a recorded playback um example like a you know, a common thing is a uh recorded playback greeting card When you open it you record a message and then when they open, you know, the next person opens it It plays back the message, but they just changed the timing and they changed Then it automatically records at all times then after a pause on the audio Uh volume it will um play back the existing audio, but at double speed, right? So it's a it's a cute fun hack like it's probably using an example code that they've already got Um, so again, I couldn't find a datasheet I also honestly didn't look that hard But you know, probably this is one of those chips that's slightly tweaked off of their existing line um ab 22p I'll tell you another thing. It's quite common is and I think it's hilarious that um, Whenever you get these low-cost toys and you open them up or like low-cost modules The company's often sand off the part number Or they change the part number. So it's like not as easy for competitors to clone them You know, it could be something like that as well And then this is what it's called. It's called a uh mimic Dancing cactus. So there's there's like hundreds and hundreds of sellers of these. Uh, they're all pretty much the same thing Ironically, I bet if other people did a tear down on one of these You're going to find a slightly different chip because I'm sure that there's so much competition in this space To lower cost and you know, they could have J. Lee might have made a deal with one company And then the other company wants to knock them off and make their own Cactus toy, they'll go to another company and you know, they'll they'll use a slightly different chip and uh, we write the code But uh, at least for now, I thought it was interesting. Um You know audio audio playback chips are kind of neat. I'm going to show out the great search Uh, another low-cost uh Audio chip as well, but that's that's my tear down of the the cactus buddy Hello Thank you cactus buddy for teaching us about The J. Lee audio subsystem