Next up we have Andrew pong from Huntington Valley in PA uh Pasadena I think in the good old United States of America and we have a broken podometer. Excellent Thanks Andrew Let's check it out. A broken podometer. What are we going to do with a broken podometer? I guess look at it right.

There's a note in here. Dear Mike Um, wrong show did you meant to um, send it to Mike at Mike's electric stuff perhaps in closed is a Jawbone UP wristband pedometer that does not work whichever lost the cap to unfortunately Jawbone was CAU up the center replacement did not need this anymore. I Was wondering if you could please disassemble it on the show thank you very much Andrew but he sent it to the wrong person. Um yeah, just be careful that folks you know um I I know to you Yanks we do sound all sound uh, quite similar and here it is and it's very unusual.

It is the Up Jawbone pedometer. um and check it out. it's got a TRS a 4 prong TRS Jack on the thing and presumably you just whack it around your wrist like that and you wander around all day and it uh, logs your uh, your steps and everything else. So yeah, um, go figure.

I assume like it's got a a uh, internal rechargeable uh battery and I'm not sure what it actually um, you know you must get like an adapter with it that uh, plugs into your uh PC or something that maybe that's like a Serial interface with uh Power and that's probably it you I don't know I haven't looked up the details but there you go. It's all nice and flexible and it's got rubber. I don't think I'm going to wait for tear down Tuesday I think I'll just slice that open with a knife and see what's inside I'm trying to slice this thing open here and it looks like like there's this outer rubber which kind of peels off like that, but then it. it's sort of integrated into the inner rubber Square core.

so there's that outer one and that's sort of all completely integrated into that bit. So yeah, it's not as easy as I thought I thought I'd just be able to slice this thing open but eh, requires a bit more work and I'm slowly getting into it in there and you can see the metal uh Spring Bar in there. So of course the whole thing has to have a spring metal bar in there and my guess is the batteries probably or the battery and maybe all of the uh circuitry is down on this stiffer bottom bit down here cuz you know, um, there's you know, probably a flex PCB going right through this uh thing of course. but of course, uh, you aren't going to get a well you can get flexible batteries these days, but um yeah, I mean I I think it's just all going to be uh, bound up down in there like that.

perhaps with a few maybe some uh components going off to the sides I don't know but yeah, got to go right around this thing and crack it open H oh dear, Payton's granted and pending whoopy freaking do and uh, by the way Mike did a tear down of the Nik fuel? uh and and I think that's a competitor to this uh up? Jawbone and oh look at that. is that a what's that? Is that a magnet or something? I don't know. going to have to check it out. Aha.

we sort of getting into some wires and stuff now so yeah, let me do a bit more work on this. So here it is and uh, it looks like it's actually assembled with uh, like you know, like 0.5 I don't think it's 8 mm probably .5 mm board but it's not flexible, it's just gunked together like that. so when you when you Flex it like that it doesn't you know there's a bit of giving there. But uh yeah I think they've just used very thin uh, regular fiberglass board in there and uh, this, what? what looked like a, um, a a magnet at first glance I believe is actually a piso um ceramic uh EX accer ometer which uh, you know I didn't really expect in this I expected.

you know, just a solid state mems type um, accelerometer or something like that. Certainly looks to be that same sort of, you know, uh, round, sort of uh, machined shape as you get with um, you know, those high-end um, if you're familiar with the high-end poo ceramic uh, accelerometers. So anyway, Payton's granted and pending I'm assuming that is the battery uh in there and um, there's no other circuitry under there because we can see some uh chips on there. We'll take a closer look, but they seem to be on, uh, almost like, uh, separate boards.

I'm not sure. the gunk in there's really rather annoying and they've got why they've got. you know what? Four traces leading around to this over here and I'm not. I have no idea what that end piece is.

Is there another Um accelerometer in there and there using you know, different, just maybe getting a different uh, reference point or something like that. So I'm not sure what actually is inside that thing. go figure. But I mean here's the Uh.

and then they actually have wires running off. So from the board in here, you can see a couple of tiny surface mount stuff in there. and then they have a bunch of wires just running down there into the Uh TRS Jack Aha. I Took the cap off the other end and you can see that there's some sort of connector interface in there clearly.

Um, some sort of uh, you know, test/ programming uh interface for production. This wouldn't be for the Uh user. I'm sure. I'm not quite.

Can't really see what type of connector that is though. Look, there's well, there's a center pad and there's an outer ring and that's it. And it's actually pushes in like it's some sort of tactile button. Um, you can't feel that.

Of course this isn't Felo Vision but trust me, there is a, you know, there's probably that's probably like a 200 g uh force uh tactile switch in there. So maybe they attach the uh test probe and the tactile switch says oh, okay, I'm going so that when you put the Probe on it, pushes the Uh switch down like that which then puts the thing into programming SL um test mode for production or whatever and then you use the two wire interface, ground and data there. So it's essentially a one wire um interface to do whatever they need to do during production I presume. and of course that makes sense if you remember before going into it is this four-way Flex membrane.

So you'd have two wires for the tactile switch and the other two for the external contacts. and there you go. No surprises. A TI MSP 430 This is the 430f uh 5528 in a BGA package on a um, what looks like probably a uh sandwiched Flex board.

You can see the PCB in there. You can even see the layers. I'll try and get a uh closeup view of the individual layers, but then you can see the flex um board actually sandwiched in the middle of that which then goes off to the next board over here which uh then contains I Don't know what that is, it's an Nxk, it's a TI 19w Zd6 y bloody annoying numbers. You have to decipher those.

but uh yeah, it's it. All Looks a bit of a mess because of all of the uh, all of the rubber potting compound around there. you can see more test pads. you can see little tiny like 0201 resistors in there, and uh, a few surface mount caps.

but there you go. you should be able to see the sandwiched construction of the board in there. If you look closely, you can see that that dark material in the center is the flex which then continues out over here and then it'll continue out the other side there even though it's not uh, obvious. And then you got your regular uh fiberglass board above that so that's not actually a Flex board.

As such, that is a um, one of those hybrid uh Flex in the middle uh type construction techniques just to join multiple boards together. It's a very uh, common technique when you need to put something around a circular enclosure like this. I've done this before on seismic products where circuit boards have to be wrapped around a uh, a central uh core in the middle like a central wire bundle and the Pcbs have to wrap all around that and you do that. Join the boards together using a sandwich Flex technique and they've got some more circuitry on another board in there and it's like and that looks like it's like got a conformal coating on top of that as well and then it's surrounded by the Rubber And here's the other board where the wires come in from the TRS Jack and you can see the Uh there we go.

There's a good example of the Uh Flex membrane which is sandwiched between the board I was telling you about there. You can see the separation in the two boards like that with the flex material in the middle. So maybe I'll try and actually, um, extract these boards and then you'll actually get a better idea about that. But then look, there's a little so 23 package and that's all around the accelerometer.

There you can see a couple of wires in and I think I see another Flex membrane underneath that. So oh man, it's like they've gone to a lot of trouble. They got five separate boards in this thing and there we go. There's the flex membrane that's under the accelerometer.

There there's the accelerometer. You can see the Uh, the two connections on that Wi in that's your main accelerometer, whether or not it has like a secondary uh, mems one I don't actually know yet. You can see all the boards joined up there and that Flex membrane would go right under that and you can see it up there there as well joining onto the main processor board and then another. You can see it in there joining up all the boards together and look at that on the bottom side of the board.

More components on there. We got double-sided load. Now this is as I presume the battery module, but it seems really, um, thoroughly attached to this metal uh, spring back uh band on it now I was able to snap off you can see I've snapped off uh, this side of the metal band here. but I really can't get that apart I mean I prized off the rest of all the uh, all the boards and all the flex stuff I pulled those off no problems at all.

So if you can see that all the others separate from the steel uh, back band on that but a this battery in here just doesn't want to come out, the bastard Tada Finally cracked it. There it is. Yep. Lithium Polymer 32 Milah Single cell, 3.7 volts with what looks like, uh, possibly a battery protection uh board in there as well as you'd expect.

And there you go. There's the backside of the battery protection. PCB and you can see the mosfets in there for the um, uh, over voltage, uh, cut off and uh, probably under voltage cut off as well. And there you have it.

it's completely out and you can see the rigid Flex um architecture with the different boards all joined by. The One Flex Membrane in there coming in. On this side, we have the Uh interface board there. the wires coming in for the user four pin TRS Jack Then we've got our Piso ceramic accelerometer there.

It's got its own little board. once again, double-sided uh load on both of those and that board. That rigid board, hence why it's called rigid Flex That rigid board is just sandwiched As we said before, between the Uh Flex material down in there. and that's how you join all the boards together because you don't.

Um, that does the physical interconnection between the boards. You don't actually need a connector as such, it's all manufactured and sandwiched in as part of the board. Then we've got our main processor board here with the Uh MSP 430 processor. Once again, that's double-sided load so that'll have some you know, voltage regulation and other uh support stuff on it.

Looks like we've got some Um test pads there for production testing and then yeah, we've got the another couple of chips around there which we'll have to have a look at that one and that one down in there with the test pads and then that goes all the way down to that programming SL test tactile switch interface. It's all it's A. You know, they've put a lot of effort into this thing to Uh design and manufacture this thing. I'm not sure I would have gone to all that effort and because it's all rubberized and uh, conformally coated and uh, you know, and all.

the battery was all potted up and everything else then sealed. you know this thing would be completely waterproof as well. I'm sure. And there you go.

You can see the bottom of the processor board. There you can see the crystal oscillator, few uh, passive parts and stuff like that. This would really be a pain in the ass to assemble. Um, the processor is on the top part.

There you go. There's the MSP uh 430 again and this really would be a pain in the ass to assemble and you would have to, uh, you know, go to a specialist uh, rigid Flex assembler who really knows what they're doing and can you know design all the custom uh jigs to, actually, you know, hold all these in place while they're assembled and uh, really is, uh, tricky business. Not something you would want to do willy-nilly that's for sure. Uh, you'd want to have a very good reason.

Like you know, this particular Uh application here with the uh, you know, goes around a wristband. It's all very tightly integrated and stuff like that because assembling these things um, would cost you an absolute uh fortune and you wouldn't do it unless you absolutely have to. And that right there. the Mx25 L 86e that's 8 megabit uh, serial flush from Macronix and you can see it's a leadless chip carrier There, it's not a uh BGA so that one's not as hard as the main processor on here.

the Msp430. so you know these rigid flexes combined with BGA and double-sided load and everything else. What a pain in the ass to assemble really. And that chip there I was able to find the info on that.

The NX K Ti19 W is what it's uh marked there, but it's actually a Texas Instruments BQ 24230 Uh, you guessed it. uh. Lithium ion Lithium Polymer Battery Charger I see cuz that's the only other thing needed that we haven't found yet. So there it is.

Um, that's like a USB friendly one. goes up to like 500 milliamps and uh, stuff like that. so it's pretty much all there. We've got our main processor, we've got our lith ion battery charger, we've got our serial uh flash.

Where is it? There's our serial flash for storing all the uh data. of course they don't have room inside the uh processor. and then we've got our accelerometer. uh, circuitry and stuff like that.

We've got um, interface circuitry over here for our four wire interface and that's you know about all she wrote. Really? you know all it's doing is uh you? You know there's some fancy algorithms in there to uh uh you know, read and filter out the data from that accelerometer and figure out what's going on. But yeah, all the smarts is in there like Hardware wise. If you looked at the schematic for this thing, it' be eh.

whatever. And by the way, this outter rubber here is supposed to be hypoallergenic TPU rubber. whatever that means I Guess for those uh froids out there who have some sort of aversion to Rubber products. Aha folks.

I've been fooled. This is not a peoc ceramic accelerometer like I thought I was originally um, you know, quite, um, perplexed why? you know it would have a peoc ceramic accelerometer in here instead of one of the more modern uh mems ones. and uh, so I did a little bit more uh digging and this is actually a vibrator there. This thing has a vibration alarm in and sure enough, I measured the coil in there 32 Ohms.

So there you go. the Um accelerometer therefore must be a Mems one on that processor board somewhere. and there are a couple of candidates on here. there's that bare dye sort of, you know, flip chip down in there.

it's got like triple JN marked on it I'm not sure there's another device there with not much marked on it. the black one, um, that one there obviously I believe that's the uh Crystal and the other candidate would be this uh little sucker which has 2400 p and E1 uh, something else on it I've actually um, scratched the uh top of that with my knife when I was digging out the rubber. but one of those uh devices will be the uh Ms accelerometer on there. So there you have it folks, that's inside the Jawbone UP pedometer and that's a, you know, rather interesting um, you know it's not just a regular pedometer, it's a uh construction that, uh, really, you know, the rigid Flex structure that really makes these sort of things interesting from an engineering design point of view because you know it's it's not easy to actually uh design all the logistics and uh and uh construction which goes into uh building a rigid Flex board like this that can be a real pain in the butt and you're never going to get it.

first. go in production and it's you know, you end up with all sorts of yield problems in production and all sorts of Horrors like that which, uh, you're at best avoiding if at all possible. but of course, to get in this sort of uh, form factor, this is what you've got to do. um I wouldn't have used uh, so many I don't think, but it makes sense to separate the boards, you know, separate processor board, separate battery charger board, separate uh, serial, uh, prom board, and separate uh uh, amplifier board and separate interface board I Guess there you go.

But anyway, fascinating, thank you very much. That was very interesting. Tear down and if you want to discuss it, um, the best place to do that is on the EV blog. Forum the link will be down below and if you like it please and like the video, please give it a big thumbs up.

Catch you next time.