Reverse Engineering

Evidence of Work

After completing our Break It Apart Project, we were told that we were going to work with our table group and really zoom in on one of our Break It Apart objects. My group (Zack Farbstien, Marco Flores, and Dylan Falk) chose to focus on Marco's Phillip's RC-2010 DVD player remote. Marco already had a general understanding of the remote because he studied and researched it for the prior project but we went even further into understanding its components and how they worked together to control a DVD player. We mainly focused on analyzing its buttons, circuit board, infrared transmitter, and batteries. Marco had previously disassembled the remote by prying open the casing and carefully removing the circuit board and button panels. We then researched different aspects of the remote and wrote functional, structural, material, and manufacturing analyses. (see below)

After gathering all the necessary information about our remote, we wrote a report on a Google Doc which included our purpose, hypothesis, teardown, analyses, redesign, and reflection. We also made a slideshow version and presented it to our class. Our original slideshow had all of the right information on it but it was very wordy and not engaging so we had to redo it and our final slideshow was much better. Our reports were our final product and they included a comprehensive explanation of how our DVD player remote works. 

Content

Infrared (IR) Transmission - emits a signal to DVD player and is used by the remote to send commands to the DVD player

Circuit Board - connects buttons to the IR transmitter. The buttons all have a specific path on the board which completes a circuit when pressed and then sends the remote a signal

Reverse Engineering - Disassembling an object and examining its parts to see how they connect together and work 

Gantt Chart - Graph that visually shows the starts and finishes of tasks in a project which makes it easier for progress to be tracked and schedules to be managed. 

Functional Analysis - Different part's functions and how they work together

Structural Analysis - How the different parts are connected

Material Analysis - the materials used to make the parts

Manufacturing Analysis - how the products are made

Reflection

One strength that I think I showed during this project was my critical thinking. I really tried hard to completely understand how the remote worked and connected to the DVD player and after a ton of research and studying I achieved that. I thought I put a lot of time and effort into my structural analysis and did a good job looking overall all the different analyses and reports. In the future, I definitely want to be more of a leader. There were for sure times I could have spoken my mind a little more or told my group members that they should redo parts of their analyses but I didn't. In the future, I would love to be more assertive and be able to tell my group what they should do. I knew our slideshow wasn't good enough the first time but I felt bad telling my group that and then the consequences were that we had to redo our whole presentation. So in the future I will definitely be more of a leader so things like this won't happen again.