Electronics Boffins, Please Take A Look At This....

I Drink It Up!

The above fotos are the guts of a small electronic, 9v battery operated timing device.

I "broke" it while testing out a variable voltage supply.

I was wondering how much all of the components included in such a device might cost, and what sort of expertise might be needed to construct a similar device.

The device worked by providing various intervals of time, by countdown, with before-and-after warning sounds.

They retail for £35stg, which I am sure is a small fraction of what they cost to make.

Thanks.

antoinolachtnai

Sure, ya could make them, but tooling up would cost a good bit. It would be fine if you were able to sell sufficient quantities. You could bring price down as low as you liked, really. A euro or so, probably, if you were making hundreds of thousands, and you could probably improve the aesthetics too.

However, for this sort of stuff, the happening thing to do if feeling entrepreneurial is to write a mobile phone/iPod app to do the job.

I Drink It Up!

antoinolachtnai wrote: »

Sure, ya could make them, but tooling up would cost a good bit. It would be fine if you were able to sell sufficient quantities. You could bring price down as low as you liked, really. A euro or so, probably, if you were making hundreds of thousands, and you could probably improve the aesthetics too.

However, for this sort of stuff, the happening thing to do if feeling entrepreneurial is to write a mobile phone/iPod app to do the job.

Hi and thanks, what sort of tools? I own a few Iroda butane soldering irons, and a little home-made tab-welding device, that's about all the tools I own.

Did you see the photo with the micro-chip?

Well there is a glossy blob on the chip, do you have any idea what that is?

I would be grateful for any info you have on what tools would be needed to do this! Thanks and best of luck.:cool:

antoinolachtnai

By tooling up I mean setting up a line to mass produce. You would get a manufacturer to do this.

The chip is probably a programmable integrated circuit. This is the intelligence of the unit, such as it is. You program these from a computer. You would need to learn to do this, obviously.

You could build something like this but you would need to learn a good bit about electronics and timer circuits. If you were just building one it would cost a good bit more than 35 quid.

Stoner

you'd need a low wattage soldering iron so as not to blow the components. It could be something as simple as a cap needing replacement. However 35 stg is a lot for a basic timer, I've seen cheaper units that when you take them apast they have the body of a crayy €2 digital watch in them, anway have you tried another supplier,

www.cpc.co.uk or ebay? I'd say you could pick something up for €10. Anytime I attempt to build something the bits set me back a mint, sometimes you even end up bulk buying and never using the other components. I'll look around for a made up timer.

antoinolachtnai

I suspect that this timer is set for repetitions for a particular sporting exercise, rather than a general-purpose counter.

10-10-20

Give us the numbering from the big black chip, with the character spacing as it is on the unit.
We'll work it out from there.

The big blue part looks to be a hex encoder anyway, the rest is the simple timing circuit for the main chip and the switch for the buzzer.

We're talking about ~€10 for all the parts, or there about.

I Drink It Up!

10-10-20 wrote: »

Give us the numbering from the big black chip, with the character spacing as it is on the unit.
We'll work it out from there.

The big blue part looks to be a hex encoder anyway, the rest is the simple timing circuit for the main chip and the switch for the buzzer.

We're talking about ~€10 for all the parts, or there about.

Hi there, thanks for your input, I will take a very high resolution foto of the chip and upload the pic as soon as I get my camera back, there are two numbers, one of which is partially obscured by the melt/blob.

Should have it for you in less than 24 hours...cheers.

I Drink It Up!

antoinolachtnai wrote: »

I suspect that this timer is set for repetitions for a particular sporting exercise, rather than a general-purpose counter.

Yep.

It is an endless cycle........it counts into the desire time, counts that time down, and counts out the last 10 seconds, before repeating.

10-10-20

Just scrape off the blob. It's glue.

gu10

if that IC was a simple yoke like a little PIC 16 or 12 then you could buy all the parts and make one for around 10e

you'd get the diodes, resistor and a few of the caps from some ould broken yoke you might have laying around, they are in almost everything

DublinDilbert

gu10 wrote: »

if that IC was a simple yoke like a little PIC 16 or 12 then you could buy all the parts and make one for around 10e

you'd get the diodes, resistor and a few of the caps from some ould broken yoke you might have laying around, they are in almost everything

Yea I'd guess its a 16F84 CPU, going by the pin out and where the resonator is connected. You could use a much newer/smaller PIC to do the job and would have a build in resonator etc...