Reverse Engineering.

Intro: This is the reverse engineering project, our goal here was to use an object which we had already used for the break it apart challenge and be able to reverse engineer its components and discover more about what was happening on the inside as well as try to improve the design of the original creators.

Our object: For our project we chose to work on a simple music box seen in the picture below. This music box has simply allows the user to press a button playing a tune and then be able to increase or decrease the speed of the music using a turntable.

Step One:

We first had to ask ourselves what is this product and what are the main components and systems we should be looking at? What did we want to focus our research on ? And lastly, what should we learn about our object that would be vital to re-designing it?

Step two:

Now we had to make a hypothesis about what we could do to our product even though we still had very little knowledge about said product. We knew we could access the power form the motherboard so we could change the source of power as well as where the power was coming out. Next we knew the plastic casing was cheap due to its thin quality and we wanted our product to feel better designed and stronger, after thinking of some materials we wanted to be different and research titanium. Lastly we wanted to swap out some cheap components in the power side with some new up to date kit, with this in mind we research small solar panels as well as rechargeable batteries.

At last we had out hypothesis, "We hypothesize that with our positive and negative wires discontinued we can replace the speaker and rewire the sound to be played through an aux cable allowing new speaker or headphones to be plugged in. Secondly we want to rewire the power to come from a rechargeable battery rather than 3 batteries which will eventually loose charge. Next we want to add a solar panel to charge the new batteries and finally a titanium case replacing the plastic one.

Step three:

step three was the disassembly stage, this involved taking everything apart form the product and getting a closer more in depth look at each of the components and to start making sketches of the design. Then we tracked where energy flowed within our system and created a flow chart.

Step four:

This step was the most time consuming and in depth as it revolved around specifically researching all components finding specifics of not only the parts within our product but the parts we planned on adding as well. We split the group for this step and allowed different people to take over different roles in our research and below is such research.

How are the different parts connected?

• The motherboard is connected to the batteries with copper wires. The buttons connect to the motherboard directly. Lastly the turntable is connected via the plastic case to the motherboard

What materials are used?

• Some of the materials we were able to identify are copper wires, plastic casings(HDPE), aluminum screws, fiberglass, copper for the motherboard and lastly more copper and HDPE plastic for the speaker.

How is the product made?

• In China using high density polyethylene plastic as well as copper, aluminum and rubber for the inside of buttons.

Subtasks - Structural Analysis

• There are quite a few parts of the music box. Going from some of the more basic elements there are four screws holding the plastic shell together sitting in each corner of the box. The Plastic Shell is used to keep the inside protected, and so it is simpler for the user to understand what to do when using. The shell protects the inside while making it aesthetically pleasing and effective.

• Then getting more into the internal pieces is three screws hold the Motherboard to the case making sure it stays in place. There are three more screws holding the speaker to the case which serves the same purpose of the screws with the motherboard.In the whole music box there are four wires used all together; 2 connect the battery terminal to the motherboard, 2 connect the motherboard to the speaker.

Subtask - Functional Analysis

• The Motherboard controls all the processes of other components.

  • Inside a motherboard is; a socket for the microprocessor (allows specific cpu), chipset (made of a northbridge and south bridge which connect to the cpu), The BIOS (basic input , output system which controls basic functions) , the peripheral component interconnect/PCI (allows connections to sound), integrated drive electronics/ IDE: (allows for hard drive to be built in/ where data is stored.) Lastly the cpu, (main processor): this is the most important part of a motherboard for determining processing speed.

• The batteries deliver power to the motherboard and the speaker.

• The speaker is where electricity is converted to sound waves making the music.

• The turntable allows you to increase or decrease speed of the music via the motherboard.

• Music selection is connected to the motherboard and together complete the main user interface (U.I) allows the user to select a specific tune which will then be played when chosen.

Subtask- Manufacturing Analysis

• Manufacturing describes the application of tools and processes to the transformation of raw materials into finished goods. There are a couple of different types of manufacturing analysis which are machining, joining, and shearing and forming but only forming and joining are applicable to the object. Forming methods the plastic was formed by heat making the outside. also plastic housing creating places to house the other materials

Joining methods- connects the speaker to the motherboard and the batteries and the other board to the batteries; soldering.

Material Analysis

• To answer one of our original questions when analyzing the object,”Type of material and their property?” We are going to break down all of the elements of the music box.

  • The plastic is used as the main casing and for the speaker and it can withstand 21,000 psi or 144.8 mpa (megapascal). The Alkaline used for the battery has a 1.5 volt battery and a lifespan of 6 to 8 years. The aluminum which is used for screws has 90 mpa. The copper is used for speakers and for the wiring system,16.78 nm at 20 degrees celsius. The Fiberglass which is used for motherboard 30,000 psi= 206.8 mpa.

• Future endeavored materials are listed with more information about them below.

• The titanium case which has 1400 Mpa versus the plastics 90 mpa. we will keep the same shape as the old case but use a different material, after taking the area of the case we find we will need. 4.02in^3 of titanium at the current cost of $30/lb for pure titanium that comes out to a cost of $19.65 for the titanium case.

• Rechargeable battery which is lifelong versus the 6 to 8 year battery life on a normal battery.

• The Solar panel which is an eco friendly way of charging rather than using fossil fuels from an outlet. The solar panel puts out 0.6 amps and 6 volts which is more than we need consider our previous batteries put out 4.5

• Finally the aux cable: Allows the ability to plug in headphones and have an ease of hearing compared to small speakers. Requires 150 mv which is easily doable.

Reverse Engineering Redesign Cost

• To achieve our goals of redesigning the music box we are going to need four different things.

• 0.6w, 6v solar panel - $8.95+shipping tax

• 3.5mm aux port connector - $7.99+shipping tax,

• 1.2v AAA rechargeable battery - $3.92+shipping tax

• titanium case: $19.65

• total is $40.51