I Just broke something and it turns out that it was a really good thing that I broke it because it is this very old and very discolored Happy Flower which is based on the original flip flap and this is one of the first. uh, solar powered Flappy pendulum type ornaments and you're used to seeing all the sort of hula girls and Mr Bean and stuff like that that, uh, they're just mass produced. you can get them so cheaply and they're all based on this little circuit board of the capacitor and the Chip And What happens is there's a coil at the back and the capacitor is charged up by a solar panel and if it's uh, not moving, it will reach a threshold and it'll pulse that coil and it will just start it. Uh, oscillating and move these a wee bit.

but as soon as it does start moving decisively, the magnet passing over the coil can pre-trigger it. It can actually sort of gazump that and uh, then it hits a sort of resonance and it just keeps going at its perfect speed. This thing. um, aside from the fact it's really good construction, it's got little counterbalance weights, it's got little brass bearings for the, uh, the flacky bits.

But the interesting thing about it is that when we go inside, it's a circuit board. Let's get this out. Let's get a screwdriver. It's got quite a big coil and the circuit board looks to all intents and purposes or is this going to come out that is very stiff with age? Uh, but if I take that off, being very careful about the fact that yeah, I think I might have to take everything out here.

Let's lift. let's take the whole thing out. This thing also has a lock underneath it that if you twist it, it's a I'm not sure what it does that actually twist this out I think if you twist that, it locks the thing and stops it from rocking which is presumably for transport or if you just don't want the noise a bit rocking. But this thing has discrete circuitry which is great because it means we can narrow.

have to be very careful. Very fine wires, two transistors, uh, the electrolytic small electrolytic um, already, no, not quite and a little man the coupling take faster. Uh, this should be very interesting to reverse engineer and that's exactly what I'm going to do right now. Uh, when I come back with that reverse engineer will be a different location because I'm moving about at the moment with work so filming in different places.

but I will be back in a moment. Uh, and we'll we can take a look at the circuitry in this and see how it works before it reached this sort of era that they just stuck it on one little blob on a circuit board. So one moment please and resume the video in a completely different location. after quite a lot of heavy work during the load end of a show, the current location is a bit.

It's not great for filming, but I'm working on it. The camera is quite a distance away, so my apologies if there's a bit of potato. Vision that is what can happen. The Acoustics will also be completely different.

So the back of the circuit board is just as you'd expect. It's a fairly chunky, single-sided circuit board. nothing particularly special. Notice the borders around the pictures because I'm not being able to crop them because I don't have my Guillotine here, but that's okay.

I can find scissors or something to make things that neater. Anyway, the front of the circuit board is much more interesting. The coil is over here. There's a 100 nanofarad capacitor in parallel the car.

There's a transistor to switch the coal. There's a transistor to switch to that transistor. There's the main reservoir capacitor, and then there's a feedback capacitor, a couple of BIOS resistors. Let me show you their schematic, so bring this in and then I shall just stand up sitting there at the moment at a bench and zoom down this.

and my apologies if this is going a bit potato. Vision The camera is quite some distance away. Let me see if I can take in the exposure down I can tame the exposure down right? Here's the solar panel. It looks like a standard calculator solar panel they've used and it is charging this 470 microfired capacitor.

The code into the coil is being switched through this PNP transistor in 8550 and that transistor is being switched by this Npn transistor on S9014. And it's because of the arrangement of uh, the two transistors that it can actually self-start So initially when this unit detects daylight shown you in the solar panel or it's put in a limited area, this capacitor starts charging up. This transistor here has bias resistors on a resistive divider which does two things. it keeps it at slight bias, but it also as the voltage increases gradually the voltage is divided down that will reach roughly 0.6 volts in this transistor will start conducting.

When it does, current will flow through this transistor, this resistor here and it will power the base of this transistor which starts turning on. That does two things. it turns on the very high impedance coil here. that's the kicker and Sense coil 1.673 kilo ohm.

but it also provides a feedback path through this 22k resistor and this decoupling capacitor to actually drive the base of this transistor a bit harder. So as soon as this transistor starts turning on, it starts turning that one on that provides positive feedback and it causes an avalanche effect and that suddenly turns this transistor on fully. and that then turns this transistor on fully and gives a magnetic pulse. In doing so, that starts the pendulum swinging or at least gives a random kick.

Usually when you power these things up or as daylight approaches, you'll see the pendulum just kicking randomly because it doesn't quite get up to its full. Tempo However, once it is up to its full Tempo and it's swinging fast enough, it passes this coil and induces a slight voltage in it that is also fed back to the Baseline transistor. And now this time as this capacitor is charging up, it's not just waiting to reach that voltage threshold of these resistors. It now can have that beaten by the Uh, the pulse of the magnet swinging over the coil and that will just boost it right over the edge and we'll give it a kick.

So that means that once basically the pendulum is swinging, it will actually trigger a pulse that keeps its swinging at that resonant frequency. It's very clever, very neat. Not sure with 100 nanofara capacitor is for I'm guessing that's to stop or solution in the coil just to dampen it a little bit and provide nice decisive pulses. Um, and that is more or less it.

It's a very simple circuitry. Um, and it totally beats that little layer. The Blob Chip Now it's interesting to know that another Channel called Electron Update: They actually took the surface off one of those chips, they ground it down and uh, removed the resin with chemicals and uh, it was really complex inside. Compared to that, this is a lot simpler and also you can fix this and also you could build your own circuitry for driving a pendulum and self-starting based on this circuitry.

So it makes this actually more interesting than the mass-produced one. So that is it. That is the little flip flap circuitry. It's actually quite neat.

Uh, very clever bit of circuitry and that is repairable and hackable and can be used for your own purposes. That's a win.