Label Maker - Angelica Cupat and Emily Phan

For this project, Emily and I decided to knoll a label maker. Before we disassembled our thrift store find, we made sure to waste an hour on our sofa making dozens of fun labels. We became very attached to our $2 labeler and hesitated to place the screwdriver into the first screw.

Label makers are pretty complex. One of the coolest things we discovered was that our little labler had a motor that was responsible for unrolling the label strip. When the keyboard sensor registered that the "print" button was pressed, the motor would activate, causing fans and rubber coils to spin and roll out a printed label. The black letters that are printed on the label were created through applying a heated plastic strip with tiny sensors onto the temperature-sensitive labels. 

Though Emily and I completely ripped apart our poor labler, we learned a lot! We are set on purchasing a new label maker from a thrift store in the near future.

Knolling – Fat Loss Monitor – Rishi Agarwal and Annie Pyle

No Phones At The Table – Pseudocode and Pseudotable – Rishi Agarwal and Annie Pyle

Apparently fat loss monitors are pretty simple. The grips are literally just thin pieces of metal used to conduct electricity through the user's hands. The plates touch wires which lead to a sensor that processes the electrical signals and relays the information to the main processing unit. This unit seems to be connected to basically everything else on the board including the batteries, the buttons and the screen.

The most intriguing part of the teardown was the screen. At first, it seemed that the screen was not electrically connected to the board. Upon closer inspection we realized that the screen was connected to the board by a thin, transparent film on the screen's edge and narrow conductive columns within the foam that supported the screen itself. 

Karaoke Machine // Maddy Harrison & Ben Schiffler

This karaoke machine with disco lights was a very interesting pick for this project as it not only looked wicked as heck, but also looked like it was built of a ton of crazy component parts. We soon realized after taking it apart that while it was actually quite decent looking on the outside, on the inside it was a hot-glue-mess of pieces thrown together with little semblance of organization.

         

It was divided in half with an apartment-like structure of wood all hot glued together. We assumed from the outside that there would probably be some central nervous CPU that took in the various tactile, microphone, power, and cd inputs, and converted these to the outputs of the speaker, lights, and auxiliary output. In actuality this was spread across several circuit boards, a mess of wires, all which were slotted around this two-level housing structure.

We did note a few things we hadn't thought of - there's a kill switch directly wired from the cd lid, which you need to open to access the CD spinner, to the CPU - we assumed this is what allowed the cd to stop spinning when the lid is open. There were a few other weird moments, such as when we noticed the speaker was wired through the AUX output board as opposed to the CPU, and how the CD Reader kill switch went first to the CPU as opposed to the CD Reader. Some of these were probably due to physical constraints, but given the amount of hot glue and ramshackle interior construction that happened, it's equally possible that there just wasn't much thought put into it.

In the end, it was fascinating to see how cleanly such a messy system can be abstracted. Perhaps even more interesting however was, in looking at from the outside, it looked and acted like a system with a very simple mental model: you put in a CD and your microphone, and get out a TV display, blinking lights, and audio. However, when you look at the inside, the mess of construction compounded with the actual need for more technical wiring makes the system into a much more complicated (and perhaps, needlessly so) system.

Alarm Clock // Tess Manthou & Jordan Kiga

      The portable clock/alarm clock sparked our interest because it’s a very typical object in our society that resides in just about every home. Even with the growing use of smart phones for clocks and alarms, physical clocks still surround us day to day and we had never given much thought to how they actually operated. Before we took apart the clock we guessed about a very simple system inside the clock. It turned out that we were basically right as only a small number of parts make up the machine. The battery starts the operation by enabling the on/off switch, which drives the motor to control the clock hands. The clock hands are also operated by the alarm setting and the manual hand controls. Although the interior was simple, It’s enlightening to discover how exactly this basic object functions. Next time though, we may pick something a little more complex.

Game Controller / Christine & Olivia

We decided to choose a game controller as our object because it was not only nostalgic, but mechanically interesting as well. It also helped having the colorful buttons to catch our attention as well. As we took apart the controller we discovered that the basic functionality of it was not that complicated at all. In lame terms, there is a power source a main control panel that determines what the user is trying to accomplish and relays that to the main game box.

Even though the simplicity of the basic terms, we realized that the technical aspect such as the infrared device is very complicated. This is why we chose the game controller.

Flashlight - Jessica & Gloria

We discovered that the flashlight uses a simple LED light and circuit that is powered by three watch batteries. The movement of the flashlight comes from the energy of pushing the button - which releases the spring and turns the viscous hinges. Once the viscous hinges turn, the circuit is completed so the light turns on.

We chose this object because of its interesting mechanical aspect. Although the technical aspect of the flashlight is not complicated, it still performs a complicated enough movement that appeals to us.

*TYPO: Viscus --> Viscous

Radio Alarm Clock | Hsuan-Ting + Melinda

The electronic we dissected was a radio alarm clock. We chose it because it seemed to have a lot of functionality and could connect to various things, including the iPod, usb, memory card, stereo and the radio. We were interested to see how these things linked to the alarm clock and how the two speakers on the side connected to everything else. After some trouble of opening the device up (two screws were hidden beneath rubber feet), we were met with a tangled mess.

Wires from one board connected with two boards and the wires on that board were connected to yet another board. After unscrewing the electric innards from the plastic cover, we could finally see the inner workings more clearly and try to understand the connections. There were 5 distinct boards. One contained the screen and buttons, while two others were assumed to be the power boards that got power from the battery and wall socket.

According to our concept map, the all the inputs would have to route through a computer, get sorted and sent to the display and the output. Therefore, we assumed that the remaining two boards were the cpu. What surprised us the most about the gadget was that even though the outside looked like a sleek black ball, the inside was a jumbled mess.

Another unexpected finding was that contrary to our initial guess that there was only one cpu circuit board, there were two. We later found out that they were different “smartness”. Functions that needed more processing were connected to the “smarter” cpu, while the simpler functions connected to the other. Both were interconnected so that communication could occur.

We were also really curious about the speakers and were excited to dissect them, only to be disappointed by a very simple contraption consisting of only two pieces. On the other hand, it was interesting to see how the buttons connected to the circuit board and how it functioned. There were actual buttons on the circuit board, but a plastic piece covered over it to give the buttons a better appearance. The plastic piece had tiny feet on the other side to raise it up a certain distance from the circuit board. There were three per button, two long and one short. The two long feet were in charge of maintaining distance while the short one connected to the mobile part of the plastic and could press down on the button underneath.

Lastly, we found that there were many plastic pieces in between each circuit board. The plastic had two functions, the primary one was to keep the pieces attached to the plastic shell as some boards had to be flush to the surface (screen and buttons). The other function we guessed was that it was to keep the boards from rubbing against each other and damaging the pieces on them.

Knolling

Diagram