In my never-ending quest for the tackiest stuff that's available: I Have found it rather. Splendid Pink clam with glitter Peril that changes color and has an agitator to make the glitter move around inside it. And this is actually take two because it turns out that this had a devious bit of trickery to it to try and stop you actually opening it. But let me turn the light out and show you what this looks like in the dark.

So the globe in the middle the Peril The sphere is made of plastic and it has that. It seems to have three LEDs under it and a motor with the agitator to stir about. and I'm guessing the reason they're using the Uh motor and agitators. It's just kind of hard to make a proper glitter lamp that uses thermal convection.

This is by far the easiest way to do it. The reason you're seeing a set of foamy bubbles here is simply because I'm holding it at the wrong angle here so you can see it changing color and agitating up the glitter right. We've seen it. We've seen the swirls projected.

We've seen the glitter shining all over the back. Let's take it apart so watch your eyes. It's about to get bright again. The black background means that intends to change Wasn't too bad.

So here's how I Get caught out. now. this thing runs off. USB It's got a switch in the back and it also runs off three AAA cells I Think the reason they've gone with Tripoli is because the motor is in the middle here I Know this because I've had it open because there was no real Choice Given the first take of the video, it went horribly wrong when I took all the screws at the bottom and couldn't get this off.

It seems to have a hidden screw at the back, which it certainly does I Don't know why they've done this, but there is a clipping mechanism here and I have uh, filed off the clippy bits because this was clipped in with Force after they'd put in a hidden screw how it mean so out comes that screw and Out Come the two other screws that I put back in because I certainly wasn't going to like put them all back in and this should reveal what we need to see. It would have been nice to use double is, but they just seem to always use triple is now. this should theoretically unclip properly and it comes apart cleanly. Now, it's worth mentioning that the globe here looks as though I think they've glued as well, but it has been it capped into this, they've put it in and then locked it and the globe has a lid and it's also this little rubber.

this silicone Rubber seal that they filled up the liquid when they've finished doing the whole thing. topped up as much as they can, then put that little bun in, but there's always a little bit of air left inside these. You can also see a slight seam 90 I'm guessing this is a blue molded like bottles? Yeah, I Can feel a slight seam at the side. It means it's quite robust.

It's not glass, which means it isn't going to smash, which is quite nice. Oh, you know you're not going to see the agitator. The agitator is rolling about inside. I Shall show you that afterwards.

Here is well, actually I'll show you now by zooming down on this. So this is a similar agitator. It's got a motor. There's a motor there with quite a big magnet, and it's got a neodymium iron Boron magnet in it.

And then in the actual vessel itself is this hemisphere with little blades under the case of the one that's in that. It's slightly different. It's only a recessed the bottom in the magnet, a cylindrical magnet just glued in sideways and that couples magnetically through the plastic. So when the motor spins, the little agitator, blades spin two.

Okay, now you've seen that. Let's get back out and look at what's in here. So there's the Power Socket board. and here's the main circuit board, which has a little ubiquitous eight pin chip.

It's got a three, two, eight, three, five, two five. I Can never remember those names. Go in. The data in the circuit board is Three, Three eighteen, Two thousand and eighteen Just prior to the pandemic.

But uh, these these things have been I Mean they really are just rows and rows them in every color in the window. So it must be quite popular in their shops. So the circuit board lifts off. It's a single-sided circuit board.

Interestingly, it's got patterns of homes around it, suggesting that was designed to take five millimeter. LEDs too. And the motor itself is just held in by three washers. Let's Zoom down this.

It's good. Three washers and three screws just to clamp the motor into position and then this little thing that is wedged onto the motor, a little square carrier for the magnet. that is it. retail art.

and I think I'm going to be jumping bench at the moment. so I shall take a picture of this and we can take a closer look once. I'm back at the usual bench. So um, I'll do that right now one moment.

please. Reverse engineering is complete. we are back at the normal bench. Let's explore.

No great surprises. A simple power supply based on a 10 Ohm resistor and a capacitor to provide a filtered Supply to a pick style maker controller. I Say pick because the pin out of this and the fact they've not used PIN 4 does hint an older design with Pic 12f629 Microcontroller or a clone thereof. The microcontroller drives the red, green and blue LED VR 27 Ohm resistors and it also drives this transistor over here to switch the motor with its own resistor for controlling the speed and a little capacity across it for noise suppression and also to protect against spikes damaging the transistor.

Uh, other things worth of note: the holes in here that have been punched and they say punched because this is a Srbp printed circuit board, synthetic resin bonded paper and one of the ways they Mass produce those in some products is to instead of drilling holes, they'll actually have a sort of mechanical punch that the circuit board goes through and it just smashes all the holes in one go. and uh, that kind of fits that. If they wanted to reuse all these other existing holes in the hole in the middle for the motor, the agitator, and the support pillars, it makes sense to just use the existing jig and just leave those in. Um, let's take a look at the schematic.

I Don't think there's anything else worth mentioning that there is a LED connection Point here in the resistor and there's also a pad here and here for time minus and time plus. not sure that's far. I'll make a guess. let's get even closer.

so the supply can either be from USB or three AAA cells. Each of those has a diode in series to prevent them back feeding into the other. There is a switch and the switch then feeds the minerals this uh, four volt Supply I started writing 4.5 kind of thing like that, but in reality it's going to be the 4.5 of the three Triple A's minus a diode drop. or it's going to be 5 volt minus a diode drop.

So the voltage will fluctuate depending on the actual application. The power source here is the filter based in a 10 room resistor in a capacitor. For the mystery microcontroller, they are the red, green, blue LEDs that do illumination with their 320 subno resistors. There is another connection.

Here's the time connection and it is just directly an output from the microcontroller. It makes me wonder if perhaps there's a switch across that and it's normally pooled high and if you click the Switch it pulls it uh, low and maybe puts in a sort of like six hours on 18 hours off. Timing function: I'm not really sure. Um, that wouldn't be an accurate taming function based on internal oscillator, particularly with the battery voltage that would waiver.

Uh, here's the motor with this little capacitor across it. There's a 75 Ohm resistor used to control the speed of that motor. It just basically sets it to a nice agitation speed. and there is a classic Y1 Npn transistor.

I Think it's Npn with a 1K resistor going to the base to turn it on and they there's the LED and resistor that's not used I'm guessing maybe there's an option for a version with a wires going into the lid of the clamp, pointed with an LED pointing down. Not really sure. It is a universal circuit board that will be designed for many different applications, but there we go. It's quite nice.

it. Uh, it would be nice with the motor to have an alternate Direction even just twitch Direction just to stir the liquid up in a more controlled manner because it tends to create a little Whirlpool but most of them do. that. Might be worth experimenting with.

Uh. But other than that, um, it's fairly standard. It just looks like it is a standard Uh design that's used in many applications and just right at the moment. The clam shell with the power limit is currently the Vogue application.

Yeah, Interesting fact. Quite visually appealing, especially at night.