I Have found another power Saving plug. This is one of these plugs that you just plug into a socket and it miraculously saves your power. And it's interesting to note that if you're getting Deja Vu off this case, it's an ionizer case, but they've repurposed it. I Guess it could be used for many things and the instructions say product name, economize or load 10 000 Watts power supply voltage 90 to 240 volts Direct plug-in Uh, plug in the power supply and press the switch button because that's quite handy on that energy save.

You just wanted to turn on and off the energy saving the button. When the product works, the blue light is always on and the red light flashes. This is the Intelligent Power Saving Schema product, which is a normal phenomenon. Excellent.

I Mean it's not bad. English If I bring it in and plug it in, this is where I'm going to have to cover a part of the display with the unit. It shows a current of 77 milliamps, power factor 0.27 and a power dissipation and standby of half a watt. If you push the button, the red LED flashes a couple of times, then it goes to Blue and the current increases.

But the power Remains the Same and the power factor goes down. meaning it's doing something and that's very weird and every so often it will do the red red blue with the LED again just to show that it's obviously active and doing things. Press the button again and the power factor drops down again. That's strange.

What is the circuitry in this radio? Let's open it up. Let's give it the finger test. No, no charge. That's good.

Quite thin housing. So I'll use this screwdriver to take the screws out and these cases tend to have an outer shell and then a sandwich that goes on our side. This is not hard to come here. This is a Timbre proof screw or something that is not canode.

Oh wait, no. the front is coming off. gradually. it's loosening.

I Just think I'm using the wrong screwdriver for the job. So here is this right that does hold a charge? Yes, right. It makes mental note that holds a charge. Lovely.

Let's not touch that again. I'm lying. I will touch it again. So what do we have here? I'm seeing this capacitor here.

What is that? Is that? a track switching? a capacitor or something? bt136s that may actually be switching the track and out? Uh, we have the what I'd guess is the driver capacitor here. We'll tell you what. I'm going to take the circuit board out after discharging it. Although there's a position for the discharge resistors, they left off the ones that could have saved me from that little moment.

Yeah, see, that's not nice. That's that's nasty bastards. Not to worry. Maybe they did it deliberately.

Finger test: it's dead. This one has a discharge capacity across it. Resistor should see right. Say well.

I'm going to reverse engineer this and we shall explore the circuitry together one moment. please. Reverse engineering is complete. Let's explore.

It's a bit weird, but that's good on the component side. Well, the the non-track side. We've got the driver capacitor which is one microfart and we've got a 20 Ohm resistor. and we've got a smoothing capacitor after it's been rectified.

And then we've got the power factor correction capacitor thing. this big yellow one. Let's Zoom down this. let's get closer.

That should do it on the other side. This track here is literally just switching this across the means. this capacitor. It's very odd.

I've never seen that ever done before. That's such a strange thing. There are two LEDs but there's a position for a third. LED which is unfortunate because it doesn't really make a lot of sense.

It may have been an option to be able to show when this output turned on, but it's not really compatible with the position on this case. Where is it of this little slot here that the LED shines through? It's a bit strange. The whole thing's strange. The power supply.

After that drop a capacitor which does have a discharge system that one doesn't. It has what looks like positions per resistors for the anti-shock capacitor. They are unpopulated for a reason. There is a two diode, uh, rectifier and I'll show you that in a moment.

Then there's a a 10 Ohm resistor. There's a smoothing capacitor and there's a Zener diode to clamp that down to a have a sensible voltage roughly about five volts for the microcontroller. The microcontroller also has a zero Crossing Point detection and from these resistors and a push button, let me show you the schematic. The schematic has little bits of extra here in blue that are not populated for good reason.

Not sure what was going through the mount there. it's very strange. So here's Live on YouTube communion. The neutral is common to the whole circuit.

It's the zero volt reference. The live goes to the initial drop capacitor preparing the microcontroller, but it also goes up here and over to the main power factor correction capacitor. With this, it's the standard capacitive dropper circuit. except it's got an oddity of these two diodes.

because it's reference to the neutral here, it has to be referenced to neutral. To switch from the live to neutral, it can only half wave Rectify And because it's a capacitive dropper, you can't just have a diode like that in series the capacitor because the capacitor will simply charge up and then it wouldn't pass current again. So they have a second diode here that when the capacitor is pushing a positive through, it will go through this diode to the circuitry. but with negative the positive go from the neutral up to that.

So a discharge the capacitor ready to pump another portion through. on the positive going cycle, there's the smoothing capacitor 470 microfarad, 16 volt, a 10 Ohm resistor to limit spikes getting through, probably to protect the chip. There is the Zener Diode and then two little decoupling capacitors one, uh, smaller on the other I'm guessing. Ultimately, there are different value just for extra filtering.

There's a bigger one and a small one. Didn't measure them because they're in the circuit and that kind of makes that difficult. The positive reel also drives the two LEDs the red and the blue LED and they each have Let me just double check this: a 1K resistor in the sear system at 1K two times one k down there. Here's the Zero Crossing detection.

That's the only reason I can think that they're using that, and it's purely to reduce the power required by this circuitry. Because they have chosen to drive the triac with reference to the common zero volt rail, which means they're driving in both halves. The waveform they're driving the gate positive. You can drive the track either positive or negative to turn on.

with respect to the polarity that's across it from usually the Mt2, it's measured, which is this terminal here M T, 2 Mt1, which the gate is referenced to and gate. Because they've chosen to drive this track, which is a fairly standard sensitive track, they've chosen to drive it positive with respect to the Mt1. What that means is that the other quadrants are five milliamp, but one of the quadrants of triggering the polarity versus the trigger polarity is 10 milliamp current. So they've actually used quite a low value resistor there to push that current to reliably trigger that.

That's probably why they put the zero Crossing Point detection circuit in because of what they can do. There is that at each point in the sine wave that it detects the polarity changing Edge from positive to negative or negative to positive. It knows when it detects that that it's starting the next sine wave and it puts out a controlled pulse on this pin to the triac to trigger it. But because the track then latches on because the current swing through it from that capacitor, it will stay latched on and it doesn't need continuous Drive current.

So I'm guessing that is what that's for. Um, it's odd that they've done it, but you know that it makes sense I've used that before in capacitor dropper controlled Fairground light controllers where I wanted to save the size of the capacitor dropper it. They're only suitable for low current even though it is one microfard, so it makes sense just to pulse the tracks. It keeps the current down.

So there's the one microphone 275 volt AC capacitor. It's a class X2 X2 and the two discharge resistors across are actually two resistors in Sears and Led position. That doesn't make a lot of sense. You could use an indicator across that it would if you used a red LED It's not an efficient way of doing it, but it would light up when this track came on.

Uh, this resistor across here. not sure I mean I guess that would make that glow slightly I'm not sure what that resistor is for there. It's a bit strange, but if not populated, it was also a very small resistor. uh, it's going to be tiny ones so not really rated.

tub means voltage across it I think these are just uh I have a little accidents from their design I don't think they're really intentional. Oh, and of course there's a little button to put on a show and oh, you have 20 past drawn and then blink the LEDs be on a show and every so often blink them again just to show it. saving power when it really isn't because if you're not worked out already, it's just fake. It's just sticking a capacitor interference pressure capacitor across the mains.

But it's so bizarre that they've implemented the circuitry to actually turn the capacitor on and off when you push the button. Almost as if they're just trying to add a bit of theater and make it look real. I Mean it's not a bad design, it's quite an educational design. It was worth exploring as a reminder for this circuitry here when you want to reference a low voltage Supply to one of the incoming Supply rails and you use that double diode trick and not an efficient way of doing things, but it is how they did it, just because they had to.

It's just sometimes you have to compromise. But there we have it. it's another fake plug. Oh, I should mention I Ordered a pack and it was a two pack.

It said in the listing two pack and one arrived and I contacted. the seller said only ones arrived and they said yes. By two pack we meant there's two different plug Styles available. No two pack means two pack, particularly when you're showing two of these next to each other in the actual listing.

So at this point in time I've communicated with them and they they have offered a 50 refund on the basis that I only got one and we'll see if it actually comes through. but that is it. The bizarrely over theatrical fake power saving plug. very peculiar, interesting circuitry.

I've just never seen a capacitor switched on and off by a Triad before. It's just plain weird, but fun.