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.
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