WizardTim YouTube Channel

[WizardTim]

"Taking a look at the construction and inner workings of a common SMT ceramic LCC package quartz crystal oscillator from Daishinku Corporation (KDS) manufactured in the late 1990s."

I’ve tried making videos in the past to give back to the YouTube community that’s always giving although they didn’t really turn out any good mostly because they’re not something I would actually watch. This video however was driven by my actual interest about something I wanted to find out so I think it might also interest to some of you.

Full disclosure I’m shilling myself here in an attempt to get the video out of the YouTube algorithm’s pit of obscurity as I doubt it’s going to serve my video if I just sit back and twiddle my thumbs. If you enjoyed it I would appreciate your likes as offerings to the algorithm and if you think something might become of my “fantastic” production quality consider subscribing to my video RSS feed, or the bell thing to play YouTube’s notification lottery.

Also, I’m interested in your opinion of the actual device, I’m not a silicon design engineer nor a quartz mechanical engineer so I’m sure I’ve missed or got something wrong.

[thm_w]

Way more in depth than I was expecting, great.

So you are saying they use a high frequency crystal and then divide it down, Eg 40MHz -> 10MHz. Is that due to small size of the crystal used?

Here is a PLL style unit but its not cheap ($10): https://www.silabs.com/documents/public/data-sheets/si540-datasheet.pdf

[WizardTim]

I suspect they use an 80 MHz crystal with a divide by 2 (current similar models from KDS list f0 as 80 MHz). However, if this were true, I would expect the quartz strip to be less than 0.05 mm thick but it’s 0.10 mm thick alluding to it being a lower frequency (around 16 to 25 MHz) however I’m not sure if the quartz frequency constant works the same way as conventional round disks as with strip resonators.

PLLs are much more complex and thus a lot more expensive to implement than a simple divider and they tend to have limitations especially in phase jitter and start up performance so I would assume KDS would avoid using one as much as possible, I’m wishing I powered and probed it without the lid, would have made it a lot easier.

For AU$10.45 that Si540 could be an interesting teardown there might be some RF wizardry going on to get the 1.5 GHz performance.

[thm_w]

New videos:

[thm_w]

[WizardTim]

Thanks for embedding the latest videos here, I’ve changed the thread title to ‘WizardTim YouTube Channel’ instead of ‘SMT Crystal Oscillator Teardown’ and will embed any future videos here as I upload them in case anyone wants to watch this thread instead of betting on the magic YouTube notifications lottery.

Also, some behind the scenes info; I wanted to release 3 special videos this month about a current topic and while I did get some of the key scenes recorded and the intro party edited for 1 of them as they’re somewhat expensive and involved videos I’ve decided not to rush them and to post-pone them to ‘later this year’ (Valve Time), they won’t be topical anymore but I want them to be good videos more than I wanted to release them on time for the Algorithm™. Until then I’ve got a couple other videos in various states I need to finish and post (but they’re nowhere near as interesting).

Spoiler/teaser: The 3 specials relate to electronic devices that were used during and in the aftermath of an event 10 years ago in March of 2011. (picture related)

[Bud]

Thanks for the interesting video but audio part could be better, signal/noise ratio is poor, i had to crank up the volume to max.

[WizardTim]

Is that just the SMT crystal video with the bad audio or a recent one? After making that video I went out and bought a proper audio interface and condenser microphone, while it doesn’t make my computers any quieter the noise floor in all the recent videos should be vastly lower.

[Shock]

Great videos, there were a few quiet ones. Google the best post production settings for youtube audio if you haven't already. You cant edit without uploading again sadly.

But here is what you can do, since your channel is new and only has 4k views and a few videos if you are thinking about making it more episodic you can reupload them and edit the titles such as.

WT #0001 - Bench PSU to USB Banana Board
WT #0002 - SMT Crystal Oscillator Teardown

When you reupload videos you can mention (reupload) in the first part of the title or comments and mention you had to improve the audio. A few months later you edit it out and noone gets upset, magic.

[Ed.Kloonk]

Happy to help with audio cleanup if you aren't on a tight time budget and prepared to send the file within the size of gmail's file size limit. Even if that means including a reduced video res.

[WizardTim]

I’ve had a read up on what YouTube expects me to upload, previously I was just normalizing peaks to -1dB all calling it good enough, I see now I should be doing a perceived loudness equalization to about -10 LUFS to keep it more consistent for YouTube to then normalize it again (and probably speaking louder in the first place).
I’ll do this in future but I won’t bother with the existing videos, the really bad ones I did with my old gaming headset microphone are lost causes anyway, they’re just super noisy and normalization won’t help them, they already have a fair bit of noise reduction applied.
I don’t think I will put numbers in the title, I’d rather have the extra few characters before YouTube wraps/hides the end of the title. I have however given each video a reference ID eg. ‘WT-YT-V-9’ so you can search for episodic numbers that way, but I’ve mostly done that for me naming files locally during production.

Thanks Ed.Kloonk for the offer but after having a read I now understand what to do differently so there’s no need.

[WizardTim]

New Video:

"Teardown and repair of a modern cost optimised consumer grade 'frosted candle' style LED bulb from OSRAM and in-depth analysis of the failed component. This light is advertised as 5.5 W 470 lm with a lifetime of "up to" 15,000 hours and costs at the time of writing AU$4.90. It is estimated this light had approximately 2,000 - 4,000 operating hours before failing."

[Shock]

Nice failure analysis, hopefully it's a low failure rate. Not a big fan of Osram for no reason other than a few have died on me prior to me moving to led lighting.

As long as the leds don't fail cascading one faulty globe could service many others which is cool.

[WizardTim]

New video:

"Teardown of a 20 kV 5 mA high voltage diode (2CL77) in a DO-312 package manufactured by GETAI Electronic Devices Co. Ltd. (广州市格泰电子器件有限) under the brand HGVT Semiconductor."



This video was actually filmed in June and it's only now I've gotten around to editing and voicing it, I've got several other videos filmed but not edited or voiced and plenty of half filmed or just ideas of videos however I have too many other hobbies and full time jobs to get those done as quickly as I would like but they will be done eventually!

Last month (August) I bought some new LED studio lights (replacing homemade ones), a new smartphone camera (replacing an 8 year old one) and a new desktop computer (replacing a 10 year old one) so once I finish my back log of unedited videos I should be able to start on 4K HDR 60 FPS videos.

[WizardTim]

New video:

"Taking a look at a suspicious TO-3 2N3055 BJT transistor acquired from an eBay seller for cheap that is allegedly is manufactured by STmicroelectronics."

[WizardTim]

New video (#15):
“Repairing a broken Simpson (Electrolux) washing machine from 2010 with a faulty SMPS (Switch Mode Power Supply) followed by an in-depth failure analysis of the failed component and speculating as to possible failure modes.”