Let's take a look inside. a Hot pink ladyes muff a neck muff to be precise and not just the ladies. You could wear it if you're man or though you might not want to use a pink one, you may wish to choose another color. H Noting that in some countries, pink is a perfectly acceptable color for men.

I'm going to use this pink power bank which seems appropriate because you stuff your own power bank into the little pocket here and by the power of gravity, it stays put. Uh, and then you press this button on the front and I'll Shield it. When I press this and you hold it for a second and it lights up red. That is it.

at its high power setting, press it again, it goes blue. that's at the medium power setting and you press it again and it goes green. and that is the low power setting and at this point in time, the central area of this muff is actually heating up. The way it's supposed to be worn is that you wrap it around your neck and then it passes through itself like this and that kind of holds itself in place.

Now if I connect a uh USB meter here and I plug it in. we can see when I activate this and I'll Zoom down in this just so we can see, we can see that when I power it up I'm pushing the button, it comes in about 800 milliamps. It depends on the power bank. it depends on the voltage cuz it's just a fixed resistance but that is running on a 100% duty cycle.

If I press the button again, it starts cutting in and out and it goes down to 75% duty cycle. Press it again and it goes down to let look at instructions here at 60% duty cycle. so roughly half the time on and half the time off and that seems to be how it regulates the heat in this unit. Okay, now the listing had very weird information.

If we I zoom out and we take a look at this, it describes it as really deep relieve correspond Pain Part Um: negative ions surround the body that doesn't produce negative ions. Far infrared heat penetrates deep into the body. It's kind of radiated heat I Suppose long enough, carbon fibers are densely distributed evenly, which makes sure each unit has more energy. That's kind of debatable.

and4 pound of termine beads are evenly distributed, suggesting it's weighted. It is not weed, it's just full of fley material. Let's open it up because I Think this little module here would be quite useful and we can also see what it's using as the Uh the heat source which can kind of guess what it's using as heat. Source The turmine beads have, uh, have been sacrificed in favor of standard polyester fiber here.

I Ain Going to have to I'm going to have to basically get a pair of scissors and cut into this. There was another picture as part part of the listing which showed uh a radiation symbol which was a bit disturbing. um I Did check out the gager counter and there is no radiation. that is a very tough fibrous material.

So get in like this in like Flynn As some would say, it turns out I Thought that was a a reference to the film um Tron Flynn's arcade but apparently it's not. It's apparently AOL Flyn getting in. Strange enough to ladies, apparently. So what we have here, right? This looks as though it is stitched on.

Tell you what? I'm going to I'm going to get a seam stripper and remove the stitching and we'll take a look inside this module. And also, while I'm here, let's see if we can, uh, find the heater pad in amongst this uh, fluff? is the heater pad locked in? The heater pad is locked in place unfortunately. so I may have to, uh, start cutting things open. Tell you what? I shall pause while I do that.

I'll go and get the seam stripper and then we'll H get that button off. We can take a close look at circuitry one moment. please. Reverse engineering is complete.

Let's explore and we'll start with the clean side of the circuit board first because it was very hard to reverse engineer this o to the fact that this had been potted in with silicon. They've got this little silicon uh B here with the button on it, a little piece of uh, hard plastic in here just to give it a nice clickable surface, and then the circuit board. after having the wires put on, it, is physically clipped in. here.

it's got a little recess it goes into and then, uh, it's potted in a silicone compound and that means it's fairly washproof. and they are saying that this thing is washable. I'm not sure how wash it would be, but the USB connector does have a very, very tight fitting cap that goes over it, so maybe it is more resilient. However, let's Zoom down just a little bit.

I The clicky button in the middle. Very common clicky button often found in remote controls and just about everything. It's one of the cheapest tactile surface mount buttons. And then we've got a very generous 12 LEDs for each of red, blue, and green.

Um, they are all just combed in parallel with one resistor for the whole lot. If we take a look at the other side of the circuit board and this is where it gets a bit messy with the silicone, we have the connections here. We got the two common positive: the uh positive coming in from the USB goes straight out to the heater because it's the negative that is Switched but it also goes to a 100 oh resistor and then to a diode. I Thought this was a xener initially, but just D1 I Think it's a polarity protection diode and a capacitor which then gives supply to the Uh microcontroller in the event of the polarity being swapped.

which I think this for the Diod would just short that out and the resistor would limit the current they'd see it wasn't working and hopefully swap things at that point. There's a 510 Ohm resistor going from that Uh positive rail out to the other side for all the LEDs and we've got a 1K resistor down here feeding an A9 mosfet and that is it. There's very little, it's interesting to not. They do have Uh test pads for all the Uh connections for factory testing.

Let's take a look at the schematic. It's very straightforward: I shall Zoom down just a tiny bit more. Oh crazy. Zoom Here's a USB Common and we have plus 5 volts.

It goes straight to the heater which is Switched by that mosfet, but it also goes to that 100 ohm resistor and there's a polarity protection DED At this end, if the polarity was the wrong way around, it would just dump the 100 ohm resistor across 5 volts which should be a fair amount of current. Uh, and it would get quite hot, but it would probably survive for long enough to know that something was wrong. There's a decoupling capacitor just basically to provide a little Reservoir just for stability of the microcontroller. And then there's a 5 on10 Ohm resistor feeling the positives of all the LEDs Um, And then it's the Iquit microcontroller, the mystery microcontroller which drives the Mosat.

Via a 1K resistor. There is the position on the circuit board for a P down resistor in here a 10K P down resistor, but they've not actually implemented it. That would have gone from here down to the negative rail. The LEDs are switched only one uh color is lit at a time, so they can use just one resistor and they're all in parallel.

so there's a if each of these LEDs is four times that particular color and they're just switched to the negative rail via the microcontroller. The push button pulls one of the pins, which is normally held up high internally by a what they call weak pullup. H It's pulled down by pressing the button. Um, and that is it.

Fundamentally, you click the button and put it into modes. It's all just little timing uh, stuff in the microcontroller for just basically stepping through the colors of LEDs depending on how many times you click the button and also cycling this mosfet on and off. Uh, just to VAR the heat. Okay, let's take a look at the heating part now.

I shall zoom out a bit for this. The heating pod was on a sort of Tyy type material and uh, the tyac material. I'm not sure why they've got a separate piece of the tyac material because this could have been sewn in in its own, but zigzagged in here is a heating wire and it's odd because it it's actually the sewn in with a zigzagged sewing over the actual um. heater.

and I'm guessing that means the whoever did this this was it done by a machine? Was it done by a human? The sewing machine itself is basically feeding out that heater wire as it zigzags are sewing over it. Let's see if I can find a pair of scissors and we'll cut into this. CU This is unfortunately kind of glued. uh, together.

There's two layers and we'll see what's that heater wire is if it is the carbon fiber promised by uh, the listing or is it perhaps, uh, just a sort of like the tungsten type wire. the little resistance wire WRA around a of core. We should find out in due course, but this is glued together which doesn't really help much, does it? Yeah, that is glued. Oh and you know what? Do you know what I can see already I can see carbon fiber.

It is carbon fiber. So what we've got here uh, that just looks like carbon fiber. Twisted strands I Don't know if you can actually hold on. Let's uh, get closer to this.

I'm going focus on there. and is that going to actually show you that's just carbon fiber? Twisted strands and there's a little crimp at the end going onto that carbon fiber. That is surprising I Wasn't expecting the carbon fiber, but I suppose that's a cheap material to use these days. Let's uh Focus down onto here.

So yeah, they must have a real of the Uh carbon? F here. I've just snapped the carbon fiber. uh, there must have a re of it and it's also got a little extra thread to bind it together. Going around that, by the look of it, does it have an extra thread? or am I just seeing something else? I'm going to have to have a look at it through the magnifying glass.

I Think there is an extra thread around that? Hard to tell if that's just a reflection of the carbon fiber or a thread. It could just be a reflection, just a PA momentarily. No, it looks as though it is actually interwoven. The carbon fiber is interwoven with another thread.

look of it just for strength. I Presume not strong enough to stop me breaking it right enough. So that must be the the machine that does this. Perhaps uh does just s on as it with ordinary thread as it's actually feeding the carbon fiber thread out.

but then they somehow crimp onto the end. I Wonder if they just leave the the ends up, cut, cut it to length, and then put the little crimps on with a little splh of silicone to hold it in place. But there we go. it's quite useful I Have to say for this module, just keep in mind it is well potted so you're going to have to take a note of what the wires are.

um before you remove it. Although having said that, I can tell you what the wires are. Look in the back with the wires at this end we have. oh, actually, I'll show you actually show you it here.

We have the USB in uh, on these connections, the negative at the outer side, and then the two positives in the middle, and then the switched heater feed there. but you know it could be used for many other purposes. This, and it's not an expensive thing. The whole, Because it's a mass-produced item, this sort of heated thing, let me just grab the the shredded remnants of it.

It is wrecked now. but because it's mass produced at that module is just a fairly generic thing. and uh, the A9t could potentially switch a fair amount of current because it is a little decently specked mosfet. So this could be quite interesting as a module just for you know, having a 5vt supply and just being able to actually, um, choose three pulse modulations.

Well, I suppose burst fired uh, ratios to uh, set a temperature, or set general power disribution to the load. H It's worth mentioning if you set up to the full load, and uh, after a certain length of time, it will cut down to its second setting. it's a middle setting automatically, just presumably to stop stuff overheating and also to save the, uh, lives of the, um, the power bank. But there we have it, the Pink Lady.

muff. It's quite interesting. It's a nice little bit of circuitry, very minimalist and totally functional.