*CORRECTION:* For the avoidnce of doubt I want to add a note here to say that in the section talking about exposure to the liquid I should have mentioned that the danger is highly dependant on the person, I have a hypersensitivity to it so take extra precautions and advice everyone else to out of abundace of caution. The statments I made were based on information from licensed doctors, and I appologise if I was misunderstood or unclear.
Regarding USB C you have misunderstood my grievance. Most chargers with a USB C output will not supply power without the CC resistors and I find it infuriating I need to keep a USB C to USB A cable laying around for the few devices that wont work with my normal charger, my point being I do not understand why designers omit them, as the additional cost is negligible and it makes them compatible with ALL supplies not just dumb chargers.
*CORRECTION:* To give the designer full credit, this device does have the CC resistors; it will activate a smart charger, but I don’t know where they are. The CC pins on the connector don’t seem to go anywhere; they must be built into the USB connector.
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This is the kind of device that makes me despair at the state of society. How did we get to a place where a rechargeable battery, charger, battery monitoring, and even a screen are considered “disposable”? Making this device reusable would have been so easy too!
Ignoring my dread over the future of the planet due to this kind of thing, the circuitry on the inside of this thing is quite interesting. It uses a pressure sensor in a through-hole package similar to the ones used on the smaller devices with the aluminium can “capacitor” style lithium cells, and it contains a very interesting charge chip (the LP4076E), which I could not find a trace of anywhere online, as it reuses the number of a 4000 series logic chip which dominated any search I made. However, thanks to a friend of mine who works in manufacturing in China, they managed to locate me a preliminary datasheet for this chip. It is actually a very cool chip, as it can vary its pack voltage from 4.2V all the way to 14V, meaning it would be able to charge a wide variety of arrangements of cells. The only glaring flaw with this, and only one I considered while writing the description, was that it has no way of balancing the cells, meaning it could result in cells wandering over time and possibly resulting in a huge overcharge of one of the cells, which could have dangerous consequences. On first glance I wondered if this could be a TP4056 that had been rejected (factory seconds and parts salvaged from e-waste often find their way into cheap rubbish), as the full charge voltage was on the high side, and the number of the chips is similar; however, I am now confident it is not. I am sniffing around to see if I can find some of these chips to play with, and you'd better believe if I get my hands on any, there WILL be a video on them.
The other chip in this device is, as far as I can make out, a microcontroller manufactured by Pyua Semiconductors. The laser markings on the chip were very hard to make out, and I could not read them even under magnification; the only legible part was the logo, which is how I managed to guess the manufacturer. As I cannot read the part number, there is little more I can say about it, as all its secrets are hidden in the code locked inside the chip, which I don’t have the skills to extract, let alone understand.
The LED display on this device appears to be custom made. I have had a dig myself and asked friends in the industry, and none of us can find or have heard of one like it being sold, which shows the effort that was put into designing it and manufacturing it.
This is the part that annoys me the most: I can tell a lot of time has gone into designing it and writing the code and having custom parts made for it and so on, and all that effort has been destroyed by the fact this device is not refillable, thus rendering it, in my opinion, one of the worst, most wasteful, and overall stupidest products I have ever come across.
#shocking #waste #consumerism #electronics #teardown #science #lithium #lithiumbattery #lithiumbatterycharger #LP4076E