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| Someone in 1988 had a boring job... |
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| AVGresponding:
--- Quote from: AndyBeez on October 16, 2022, 03:09:25 pm --- --- Quote from: AVGresponding on October 16, 2022, 10:01:47 am ---You really think producers of cheap tat like this also make anything high end? Colour me sceptical. --- End quote --- Industrial espionage, certainly not with this tat; but when you guys now know the PCBs seemed hand soldered, maybe the obscuration was to prevent component theft by the poor bastards who were enslaved on the one dollar and a bowl of rice a day assembly line. This solar light retailed for ONE British pound. How much would that inductor alone cost from Digikey? As for reverse engineering, it's always a cool mind challenge to discover what parts a manufacturer deemed restricted. But figuring out their motivation is less than clear, even when the part turns out to be nothing more than an obsoleted ST microcontroller. Maybe it's the build customer they're out to deceive when they might have to qualify where their stock came from? It would be very tempting to paint or grind an opamp with a 1990s date code, if it were priced 25 years later. --- End quote --- That makes a bit more sense. |
| james_s:
--- Quote from: CatalinaWOW on October 15, 2022, 11:58:12 pm ---You have mentioned that a couple of times. Unless you publish your results it is irrelevant to the originators goals. And if it took you more than a few hours to figure out it might have met their goals even if you published. Finally, knowing your proclivities a sophisticated anti-tamper person might strew a few ground chip designs around to distract you from more important and more discretely protected devices. --- End quote --- I still maintain that it's useless and a complete waste of time, I'm far from the only person who chuckles whenever I open a device and find that the numbers have been ground off the chips. It's a practice I associate with amateurs in China, I've never actually seen it done in anything reputable. It's especially laughable with something trivial like solar garden lights, anyone who can't design the circuit for one of these themselves in a day has no business calling themselves an EE. There are numerous ICs that do the whole thing and the entire circuit can be lifted from the datasheets. I have seen a clever twist a few times where commodity part numbers were put on custom ROMs in some 70s arcade games, but even then it was obvious from the (published) schematic diagrams that the part was a ROM. |
| RJSV:
Haha, LOL: Some guys rummaged around, in Barney's parts drawer, got some stray circuit board, put a HEAT -SHRINK tube on one of the connector pins...And threw that sucker straight into the 'Engineers Cage'...where those engineers began examining / discussing possible reasons,...reasons WHY ? Three hours later... |
| pardo-bsso:
--- Quote from: Alex Eisenhut on October 13, 2022, 12:02:05 am ---This thing's engineering is epic. The PCB even has grid coordinates silkscreened on it, A B C D 1 2 3 4,. Nuts. --- End quote --- Actually that was very usual and is extremely helpful when you look at service manuals or schematics, you can quickly map where is each component/subsystem located. |
| PlainName:
And alternatively, passives numbered from top left to bottom right on the schematic(s), with ICs numbered top left to bottom right on the PCB. Reasoning is that ICs are easy to locate on the schematic and passives relatively easy on the PCB because they'll be next to the same IC they are on the schematic. Of course, the trend to have things connected via labels rather than lines on the schematics mitigates against that, now. |
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