A common water ripple, projector type device that i bought in this instance from cpc in the uk, but it's very common. It seems to be a standard thing around the world. It comes with a five volt uh powers, actually, five volt usb power supply. Yes, technically speaking, it could be, but this is a generic sort of christmas lighting type power supply and, and it puts out the 5 volts up to 1.2 amps 6 watts.

And if i plug it in, we instantly discover that i've already lost the remote control. It literally i put this on the gadget mountain and the remote control media is slid and crowdsurfed all the way to the bottom. Goodness knows where it is. It looks like one of these.

If i remember correctly, but this one doesn't work, let's try it. No nothing happening right, but anyway, so i'll show you the effect this gives and then we can take it to bits. So i shall switch to that now. This is the effect it projects, it's not bad.

It's a passable ripple effect, although you can see the placement of the leds affects this of appearance. I may experiment with that, but it's not that effect. I can tell already that behind this multiple set of bugs eye lens, there is a glass ripple. Well, plastic ripple disc, that is rotating slowly in front of it.

It's a good effect, okay time for the tear down and begin the teardown. I shall unplug it and we'll start taking the screws out, there's quite a lot of them. They've sealed this well! Well, i say: they've seen it well, i've not tried it outside, so i don't know if it fills up with water instantly in the first night. I would hope it doesn't.

A lot of this stuff from cpc is actually okay. It's uh cpc is part of uh. The element 14 group farnell - is it uh, digikey yeah, not sure, not sure how many companies are part of it, but they're big. They went from being kind of like industrial supplies to just everything, quite an interesting company.

They occasionally get the shady product in from time to time, but it's not bad. There is our little ripple disc right. I can see more screws, i'm going to have to take a little ripple disc out. I shall take them to ripple discount a ticket is plastic.

I shall give it a tooth test: it's plastic, nice enough in its own right. Oh, it's got a single uh led in here. That means the chips are all going to be sort of off angle. Right.

Tell you what let's undo these screws! You can't see a thing in here because it's dark, neither can i everything's black. Oh i've just unscrewed the motor. I don't think that's what i was supposed to do. Let's try these two screws.

Instead of these will be the power cable, the power cable is, i don't want to be the motor. Oh, the whole lot stuck into the bracket uh. I shall take that bracket out. Oh, this is turning out massive i've also pinged screws everywhere.

So it's debatable where this will be going back together afterwards, look quite like it! It does strike me that it needs a little bit of hackery. Oh, you know what there's an antenna. It's radio, remote control that'll, be why it wasn't responding very well to infrared okay. What do we have now? There is the power coming on through this connector there's the motor through that connector.

Here's what so, i shall zoom down in this. Actually, you know what i may just uh cut to the chase and take some pictures of this. So we can see what it looks like right. Tell you what i shall do that one moment please, let's explore, i have inverted the image of the circuit board.

It just makes it easier to see because it is very, very black, so we have the incoming supply coming onto this uh connector here, and it goes straight to this electrolytic capacitor. It then goes through this schottky diode over to this capacitor, and i thought they would maybe be filtering it out a little bit with that diode to provide a local supply for things like the rf circuitry and the microcontroller. But in reality everything is powered from this capacitor here at that slightly reduced voltage. They may have done it just to drop the voltage to take the strain off these resistors there's also a little tiny decoupling capacitor over that one.

There's the motor connector, the motor has a diode across it and also a capacitor across it for filtering and clamping of the back emf spike. It also has its own little mosfet. There is a 3.3 volt voltage regulator here and that feeds the rf circuitry. With its crystal, and that also feeds the microcontroller, the led is switched by four mosfets, there's actually red green, blue and white and for matching one ohm resistors, and that is about it.

Things worthy of note for the rf guys they'll like this. I have a reverse engineered this. A circuit diagram down noted all the pin numbers, so you can try and deduce what chip this is, but this little coiled antenna that sits above the circuit board is just in parallel with another antenna which zigzag zigzags backwards forward along the circuit board. I wonder if they found that the effectiveness of that antenna was somewhat compromised by the big slab of aluminium that composes most of the pcb.

So basically speaking, there's a complex thing with high frequency. Well, it's going to attenuate it. Fortunately, it's not putting a signal out. It's just purely receiving it, but this uh antenna on the circuit board is basically just capacitively coupled to the zero volt rail effectively via capacitive coupling again to back from the aluminium back to the general mass of the circuit board.

Very strange. But anyway, i shall go straight to the circuit board. Oh there's also a pins here plus and minus fdc, plus a minus a powering microcontroller data, clock and freaking reset. I guess for the serial programming here is the schematic.

I should zoom down a tiny little bit onto this, so here's the incoming supply 5 volts ish, there's the smoothing capacitor at 470, microfarad 470 micro farad at 16 volt. So is this one. This is also 470 mg fired at 16 volt. That then feeds the leds.

The motor and all the other stuff, but also feeds the 3.3 volt regulator, which goes to rf circuitry. I've noted all the pin numbers down here. It's notable for one positive connection: to pin three two negative connections to fins: one and six: eight pin chip at four and seven each for capacitor to the zero volt rail eight has the crystal to the zero vote. Rail uh pin two is going through a parallel lc network to the antenna and there's also another lc network to the zero volt rail um.

This link from i didn't know which pin that was that would have been quite useful if i had noted, which pin that was uh, the data is coming out of, pin five hold on. I shall add that to the drawing just for completeness, uh where's, the matching pen for that pin five, the microcontroller receives the data from pin five decodes it and then controls the dimming and stuff of the leds. It's got four a09t mosfets each with a one, ohm resistor and the led red, green, blue and white, but it also has another mosfet called an ar hv, which is switching the motor and using positive modulation to control its speed, and it has the back emf. Diode and also the capacitor for filtering across it, and that is it not a super - duper complicated circuit fairly logical, nothing, really radical.

This little decoupling capacitor is in the vicinity of the microcontroller um yeah, that's it so it's an interesting effect. It is very typical of these type of things they're. The nicest things about this are the motor with this little pattern: disc, lots of grease everywhere or grease. If you live in a country which says grease, and then this uh insect eye type lens very interesting, i'm going to shine a light through this, oh yeah, lots of lots of light patterns.

I do think it'd be quite interesting, putting an led on either side of this, so that one pattern is going up and others going down. But i wonder if separating them too much is going to splash splat them too far apart in this, although if they were both the same color, it would compensate for that. But it's interesting, it's a very interesting and logically designed light, so that is it. The uh water ripple, projector light that runs off that little classic christmas light style power supply, but putting out five volts.

Quite neat, not bad at all.