Mystery item time, because i do not have a clue what this item is supposed to be, it was described on ebay, while i was buying lots of similar things as mini diffuser ozone, air, purifier, air, ionizer, ozone generator home bedroom. I have tested this and there's absolutely zero detectable ozone. It shows well in the picture. It's a bit sort of faded out shows the little baby with a cleft lip and this thing beaming out purple beams and leaves and uh right.

Let's open it just to see what it is, but i'll give you a demonstration of it first, although it's not that exciting. Now the first technical hitch i came across to this is it's got a little button. On top, i thought this was going to be some rechargeable device is not when i got it. I thought it wouldn't be terribly high power, i'll plug it into this little power bank, the green light flashed, but when you press the button on the top, the green light just pulses and nothing happens.

I thought - oh, maybe it's too powerful for this. I just it kept flashing as well. That's because the button is jammed down. So then i got a more purple usb power supply and i tried it again and nope it kept pulsing, and then i got the bigger power supply again, a big black web one plugged.

It in activated it uh, pressed again still pulsing nothing happening, and at that point i was thinking it's supposed to be silent. Is it is this what it does so, then i got an even bigger power supply plugged. It in uh pushed a button and it starts so there's something drawing such a high current spike at startup that every single one of these power supplies it cuts out. But here's the odd thing: if i bring in a standard, plug-in power supply with a usb power, monitor on it and i press the button.

It can start it, but it's only drawing 142 milliamps. So that must be some big capacitor or something with a very high startup current. That's strange: let's open it actually before i open it, let me show you what it looks down the end of this, so i'm just going to pause and try and actually even get this to expose properly, because it's not very bright at all. This thing it's a dull purple glow one moment please well, that's as good as i can get.

The green led is much brighter than what's going on. There's a dull purple glow, suggesting maybe ultraviolet uh, let's open it up and find out one moment please and we're back right, let's unplug this and explore it! So there's nothing obvious for getting into this. It looks as though it feels heavy. It feels like it's got.

A aluminium case - and this looks as though it's pressed up the inside, so i don't think this is going to come off and that kind of suggests that uh the bottom is going to come off here and i don't think it's going to come off cleanly now. Where's my spudger, i should have looked my spudger out before i even started. I've buried my spudger there is, but is that even going to work it? Certainly the bottom is in squint. The bottom is in squint.

This is such a tight fit. I think this has been wedged in am i going to have to drill a hole in this to try and get it out hold on, let's drill, a hornet and then hope, there's not a huge lithium battery inside though i don't think there is so, let's uh Lever a screwdriver in here and see if i can pry it out this way. Oh, that is in tight, it's glued in right. Well, that's not helpful! I think this is going to be a destructive experience.

Maybe they just didn't want us in here. Maybe they're they're hiding something uh right. Tell you what uh one moment, i'm just gon na pause and then i'll come back once i've kind of got this base out. Oh, this isn't good.

This is this actually welded shut? It's got that sticky foam pad there. That was holding the base on oh nope nope. Here it is here it is oh, it's quite a arrangement. Oh at least they've got an ionizer.

I think that's all. It is and that's kind of bad news in a way. Oh there's a, i suppose, there's a carbon filter except the air intakes there and it's blowing the air out there, so the carbon filter is doing nothing what's that about right, okay, uh! Quite a hefty construction in here like well, didn't everything this is bizarre, uh right! So, look at that off. This is going to wiggle loose, revealing the circuit board revealing an ionizer module.

This is bad news, because uh ionizers create a high voltage with respect to ambient ground. Oh and look there's the ultraviolet leds, which are just uva they're, not uh. Well, let's power up those are just single chip leds, let's power this up, let's unplug the fan, so it's not running and we'll see. If i can get any indication here of so i'll plug that in turn it on they're just uva leds.

So it's pretending to be the germicidal. I mean there's this belief that uva - and this is near uva - it's uh. It's like near ultraviolet, probably about four and a five nanometer. I don't really see this being.

Usually you can smell something vicinity. If i put a crunch across my fingers like this any degradation, nothing, these are just ultraviolet leds, just for sure, okay right, but the ionizer, the problem with ionizers and that's kind of stuck up there. It's not a great way to do it either. The problem with ionizers is they create a high voltage to ground so they're effectively, if you plug it into this power supply, the ionizer creates that high voltage respect to ground, but then you end up the high voltage across the power supply and it can actually stress The electrical separation in there - okay, let's uh, go further in this - it's like they have spent a lot of time making this, but it's kind of delusional design.

Oh, it is quite odd design, where's, a little tiny screwdriver, there's a little tiny screwdriver. So they've got a little satellite ultraviolet led just screwed on here with two leds in parallel, one resistor per two leds: there's a microcontroller there's a little mosfet that switches. I guess everything on and i'm guessing. Is it the so there's the circuit? That's switching the light.

There's the one that's switching the ionizer and there's the one: that's switching the motor, i'm guessing they're all in parallel. Well, let's take a closer look at the circuit board. One moment please. I believe this is what eve would call a treat, especially and in a way it is, but for all the wrong reasons, this product is maybe a copy of someone else's product and they've just missed everything.

So here was the point: the filter, this filter in the base here was designed to have the air pull in through here, go through the filter up through this hole and then go into the fan, which is their own way round. But i guess maybe they could have used a fan that had the port and opposite side, not sure, but whatever happened. They ended up with the grille here. So that's where they put the air intake instead of putting it down here where it could go through the filter, and that means the filter at the bottom does absolutely nothing.

But there's no point anyway, because unless you could remove the bottom of the original product that this is possibly copied off, because if it clogged up, you wouldn't be able to get into anyway. The whole thing is basically just glued together the little processor here i thought it was actually cutting the power bank out by drawing a high current spike, and my thought was that it was a fairly powerful fan. But the fan it's about 120 milliamps, but it could still start with a fairly high current but watch this. Let's plug the fan in here.

So we'll get the fan in here we'll plug the ionizer into its little socket the ionizer that isn't referenced to ground. So not a great idea, the ultraviolet leds that are drawing so little current. They really are just a visual effect. They might have just used two and we'll plug it in and when i press the button, the green led will start pulsing as if something's like cutting out - and i thought that was the power bank.

So, let's unplug the fan: no, it's still pulsing, let's unplug the leds still pulsing, let's unplug the ionizer module, which draws uh 24 milliamps in use, but must have a high in rush current i'll, just pull that connector right off. But oh now it's staying on uh! So what if i plug in the fan fans running absolutely fine leds running absolutely fine off on off on no problem plug in the ionizer? I'm gon na have to be careful this now! Oh, is this gon na go in back in there and it instantly struggles cuts out. That's the ionizer, that's causing the problems. That is very bizarre and i think it's possibly caused by well.

Let me show you this. I can bypass the mosfet with a pyramidal tweezers and everything runs, but every time i do it you'll see that the led glitches it turns on. That's the processor resetting and if i unplug the ionizer again, i could actually zoom down for this. Can i i should have zoomed out for it uh, but if i unplug that high noise again and bridge that out, i could bring on the loads the other loads and the processor doesn't reset okay.

We shall investigate that later. It's all very, very strange. Let's bring in the circuitry, which initially looks quite a nice design. We've got the push button, we've got the microcontroller.

We've got a little bit of supply filtering, which completely fails for the microcontroller, possibly because they've taken a negative here from the incoming supply over to the processor and given its own local supplier. That capacitor. But then they appear to have actually just then taken another negative right over to the main current path for the mosfet, which doesn't strike me as being a good idea. But here's what we've got so we get that little bit of filtering circuitry diode for polarity protection.

We've got the 10 ohm resistor and then we've got a capacitor that provides the filtered supply to the processor. The processor is only using three pins. The yellow pin is the uh here. Is the button being clicked to actually pull the that input to the negative rail? The zero volt rail, which signals that the button's been pressed the purple pin here, goes over to the led, which then goes to positive rail via 330 ohm resistor, just to light the led, but the bit is doing all the work.

The orange pin goes via a 1k resistor and it's got suppose: they're 10k cooldown resistor they've used 9.1 k just because that's what they had and it goes to a mosfet a fairly decent mosfet, uh 60 no3l, which means 60 volts, 3 amps, perhaps and l means It's logic, level, it's a low voltage and then all these sockets here are all just basically in parallel everything powers up at once with a little protection dialed across it for clamping any inductive spikes from things like motors. So if you want to have a rego reverse engine in this yourself, here is the top of the circuit board. Oh there's another thing: this they've used these little connectors here, but then they used actual a screwdriver connector for the actual connecting the incoming supply. That's very strange, but here is the bottom of the circuit board, which is really just basically another bus for the negative rail, a bit of heat sinking attempting and then the common positive going to all those connectors.

And then the common switch going to all those connectors right here, let's get the circuit diagram. Oh i'll, show you another circuit board. It's the led circuit board, the leds draw 20 milliamps between them, so about 7 milliamps, each four hundred and seventy ohm they've, even like they've, actually lowered the valve resistor, two leds in parallel for each of the three circuits and then one resistor for each. Let's see if we can get the kinky calculator in and work this out, uh, so that's five volts minus say about 2.7 or something like that: 5 volts.

Minus 2.7. That's just a rough figure equals 2.3 volts to drop across the uh resistors divided by 470 ohms equals roughly about 5 milliamps, so at the early voltage across these must be lower, but so that is a more or less it's not a lot of current. There are two congester leds and it's not like ultraviolet. If they'd used blue, it would have been fairly bright, but they've used the ultraviolet ones, which means they're they're dim to start off with it's very strange they've also done that thing that uh they've left the edge in the circuit board there.

I always get the urge to just snap that little grooved circuit board a bit off. I'm gon na do that, just because i want to they've v-grooved it there we go just it's satisfying and in the bin. It goes right in with this circuit diagram. It's not going to surprise you at home, it's very straightforward.

Over simplistic uh makes you wonder why they didn't use a dedicated click on click off type switch or uh. Even the little dedicated chips that just do, the on off thing, they've actually used a microcontroller for click on click off very strange. We've got the 5v supply comes in and there's the supply for the microcontroller, which is the diode, a resistor to limit the current and then a capacitor. And that means that, even if there's fluctuations in this rail, it acts like a little reservoir and it stops those effects in the microcontroller.

Shame about the negative but i'll, maybe do a little experiment afterwards. There's the 33 ohm 330 ohm resistor, going from the positive rail through the led to the microcontroller. There's the push button, bridging one of the connections to the ground, the output via the 1k resistor to the gate, the mosfet, but also pulled down via this 10k resistor. 9.1 k resistor to keep it off uh.

If that processor isn't active or uh, we'll just basically bias it towards off, so it doesn't. If that crashed, so it doesn't go into some intermediate state. Then we've got the uh the rail for those connectors. We've got the fan the ultraviolet and the ion and the little diode across them and i've missed one of the dots.

That's it right. Tell you what i am going to experiment now, i'm going to get the soldering iron on and i'm going to remove that switch and see if i can actually see what the tracks are like underneath and if just removing one pin from the switch. If the track doesn't go across might solve that problem, but it might not uh one option for solving their glitching problem if it was still power. Getting a glitch getting through here would be to use a higher value resistor, because this thing's not actually doing an awful lot of current.

Most of it's been pulled to the the ground anyway, so that could have been a higher value, resistor or a higher value past. Not sure it is anyway, i'm going to pause and then i'm going to get the soldier and i'm going to put the soldering on right now and i'll be back in one moment. One moment please right: well, i've got the switch off. Let's do some experiments so at the moment, i'm just going to bridge the switch contacts out with this just to see what happens, and it is it's still pulsing right now.

What happens if i unplug this and i cut the track that they've got here, because they've effectively got that separate negative going over to the uh the chip, but then they've brought it over to the button, but then commoned it to the rest of the circuitry here, Which you'd think? Well it's just it's the same negative, but it isn't always the case that uh, if there's a high current path, it can actually cause a voltage drop across the cable across the track and it can cause weird problems. I'm just going to cut a little chunk out here and i'm going to plug that in again and see what happens. Is that going to fix it because, after this, the next culprit is the power supply itself? It's interesting how, though it did actually work with the uh. The sort of higher output switch, the usb power supply.

Is this going to solve it? No, that's not solved so next thing i'm going to try is a bigger capacitor across here or it could try a bigger resistor, i'm going to try um i'll, take that capacitor off and see what value it is one moment plus actually enough i'll. Just uh almost swirl there i'll just do that technique i'll disconnect it, and i shall just get that capacitor off by putting a bit of soda on either side and just wiping it off the circuit board like that, let's see what value that is! Oh, it's still quite hard. Let's assume that, even though it's tiny it's going to be some ridiculously high value and set this optimistically to 200 mg ford, it's uh! Well, i would say the closest standard capacitor power to that is uh. If i can get the probes onto it, this is a problem with these chips.

Uh two microfarad, roughly okay, 2.2 microfarad right. So i'm just going to go and grab a 10 or 20, actually a 22 megahertz capacitor and stick it across that one mirror in place. So the capacitor has been changed. Let's try that nope still pulsing right next thing, i'm going to do is try that resistor and after that, it's just maybe just going to be.

This thing has got a really high inrush current. It might just because it's got a little switching converter in it. That initially draws quite a speck right. Tell you what i'll unplug that and get the solder, and i shall slide that resistor off.

I do have some surface mount resistors um. So this is a 10 ohm resistor which i've just flicked off uh right. What's my chance of actually managing to solder this on without stopping let's say, unplug everything i'll look this up just in case, let's go with the insulated tweezers here, the ceramic one. So, let's not get two resistors out at once.

I got this because julian islet featured them this little uh tiny, flip up uh component holder, it's quite handy very good for storing these, and you can stack them so now. Let's add a little squirt of flux to that huge mess of flux i'll. Do it super i'll? Do it paul style and add a a big splooge of flux? I shall also perhaps uh. This is where it would actually be handy in advice or something like that, but i don't really have something terribly handy.

I should have wiped some of the soda off those just like i'm wiping all the flux off at the same time as well. Oh well, right! Let's get that 10 little resistor on there and try and get that into place. This is where invariably, when i'm doing these every time, i try just tweaking and nudging a little bit. It makes it worse.

That looks okay. I think it might be the wrong size. The resistor physically i well, they know it looks like a one two or six. That's my preferred value of resist size of resistor surface mount simply because they're bigger so let the other end cool and then i'll reflow this end, that's a 100 ohm resistor.

Now so that's going to provide a little more isolation, let's plug everything back in including this pesky ionizer module, that's giving all the problems and, of course the ultraviolet leds got to kill all those germs with ultraviolet run at very low power at a completely wrong wavelength. Wow right is that going to make it more stable, nope it's just. I didn't don't even know where to start with that, then that is a very odd problem. What comes to mind is actually putting a capacitor locally right.

Tell you what one moment plays a capacitor uh 100 microfarad capacitor, what i'm going to do with it! I'm just going to put it across the supply. That's coming onto the board to provide a little extra buffer so that when the circuitry draws a spike, it doesn't cause the voltage to dip quite so much by just acting as a little local reservoir. Actually, i threw a bit of solder onto these just to make it sticky so right, let's put that one there, let it cool down, be a patient. Put that one.

There is this going to solve the problem, let's find out so i'll plug that connector back in i'll make sure i get the capacitor around the right way. Yes, i have no juicy bangs. Okay, let's see if that acts as a buffer to keep the supply rail intact. No, that really is crap.

I can hear things trying to start yeah, that's very odd, and it's all down to this little module here that very strange. If i unplug this module, the rest will work yeah, that's an unexpected problem that would be very frustrating they're sort of when you're actually troubleshooting it, particularly if the design you used it with. Initially, you were maybe using a different module and it was less spiky. That's very odd, not sure what avenue would go next after that.

That is quite a tricky tricky one to resolve. Let me see if i did actually clear that that's what i thought was the uh risk of a providing alternative. Negative path just basically provide a little glitch and crash the processor. Some process are very easy to crash.

I don't think it's the high voltage of the ionizers, that's causing it, although that would be a suspect. Maybe i should turn the power off before doing this. I didn't so, let's turn that back off. Oh actually, no, let's plug the let's plug this in while that's running and see if it crashes it yeah it did.

That is strange. That's super annoying! Maybe that module was cheaper than others. No, it still is crap. That is frustrating, but anyway, i'm not gon na waste any more time that, because it's such a pile of crap anyway, it is without a doubt one of the weirdest.

I mean it's nice. It's got a solid. This weighs a lot. This is heavy.

It's a heavy metal case and it's nice that they've got a steel plate with the welded rods and then all these separators going up and down, and it was obviously designed to be quite functional, pull the air through a filter and so on. Even if you can't change the filter, that's just frustrating uh, but it's been let down by so many things, basically speaking the fan where they punch the holes in the case, the point that the ionizer in the first place shouldn't really be used in isolated supply because It does create that charge into the air that just creates the high voltage across the whatever usb supply you have and then there's the ultraviolet germicidally leds that don't do anything and mo are just pointing down into the case. So you barely get a glimmer through the sort of like the holes in the top and then the fact that ionizer our brush, instead of being in the path like being the path of this uh air vent, actually take a charge out uh. It's actually just stuffed into a little hole in this, which doesn't seem like a good way to actually to do it.

It's just everything is wrong. It's a spectacular mess up, but you know what there's a lot to be said for that. It's quite fun when you actually find products like this, so i wonder if this is a copy of some something else, but certainly the description as being an ozone generator was wrong. It is an ionizer in a way, but it's it's absolutely terrible.

It's a awful product, and that makes it most excellent.