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1. Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 10:10:30 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

   So I've got a fun thing that my roommate got at an e-waste place, and I'm gonna open it up and see how it works and if I can interface with it.

   It's... a crosswalk button/speaker!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 10:14:49 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     At the bottom it's got interface stuff.
     We've got COM and +, USB-B, and unpopulated EXT button and EXT Speaker ports.
     There's also some LEDs: Mode, Data, and Audio

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 10:16:57 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     And there's nothing on the back, just a grate for a speaker.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 10:19:36 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     There are some labels: EN2 533586 17119416 and V4.05

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 10:23:31 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     So, inside. We've got this huge coil thing (more on that later), a single PCB, and a 6W speaker. This fucker is gonna be LOUD, I'm sure of it.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 10:28:11 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     So the coil thing is the button!
     See, on the inside of the front, there's a piece of metal, a rubber spacer, and a magnet.

     When you push the button, the metal flexes a little, the magnet moves, and this coil can pick it up.

     This is presumably used because this is a button that has to be very vandalism-proof

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 10:33:13 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     So I pulled the PCB out

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 10:34:55 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Fucking YIKES. This looks like it's both burnt AND corroded?
     Did this get hit with wet lightning or something!?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 10:41:06 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     The underside of that big coil.
     The three towers on the left are lightpipes for LEDs, and apparently this thing has two separate coils of wire

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 10:47:57 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Here's the top side of the PCB.
     That's more chips than I'd expect!

     Also I'm gonna give up on censoring their phone number since these punks at Polara Engineering put it on their damn PCBs

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 10:47:58 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Here's that little PCB.
     one wire is labeled +Pzo, suggesting this is a Piezo Switch.
     That makes sense! Piezo switches are known for being very reliable, especially when they need to be vandal-proof.

     There's basically no moving parts here, just a piece of metal that flexes a bit and a magnet that sways back and forth. There's very little to break.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 10:53:34 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     So, U1: It's a Microchip PIC18F46K20-1/PT.
     As you'd guess from the name, that's a PIC chip! 64 KB of flash, almost 4 kilobytes of RAM.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 10:57:12 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     U10: a Microchip PIC18F66J50-1/PT.
     Basically the same thing. A few more IO pins, I think?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 10:58:26 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     U9 is a Spansion S25FL064P, an eight megabyte SPI flash chip.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 10:59:20 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     U14 is an Analog Devices MAX5408EEE, which is a dual digital potentiometer. This is probably being used for volume control.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 11:00:42 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     U13: Microchip MCP60021 op-amp. Yeah, probably audio.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 11:03:50 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     U11 was a nightmare to photograph.

     It's a MAXIM MAX9736A class-D amplifier.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 11:08:05 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Q6 and Q2 had an interesting time.
     It looks like whatever happened blew the chips open!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 11:13:16 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Also, remember I said there were three lightpipes for the LEDs? Turns out I was wrong!

     The left one is a regular LED, the middle one is a multi-color LED, but the right one? That's an IR receiver. You can apparently reprogram these fuckers over infrared!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 11:17:09 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     okay digging into their site to find out info on this thing.
     This is apparently an "EZCommunicator 2 Wire Navigator APS System"

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 11:18:29 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     And apparently it operators at between 18 and 22 volts.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 11:21:19 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     No response at either of those voltages, though. It uses about 4 watts, but no LEDs light and the speaker doesn't yell SET ID at me.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 11:24:09 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     found the sales manual:
     https://polara.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Polara-EZ-comm-2-wire-sales-brochure.pdf

     it maxes out at 100 dB at 1 meter, but here's the interesting thing: it apparently adjusts the volume based on the ambient volume?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 11:26:05 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     okay looking closer, I'm not even slightly surprised that it's dead. Look at this, whatever happened was so energetic that it BLEW THE COPPER TRACES OFF THE BOARD

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 11:27:22 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I was gonna say "and obviously there's no point in soldering some bodge wires on to bypass this shit" but if I stick my power supply to the other side, it lights up.
     god damn it.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 11:34:36 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Not the prettiest bodge work I've ever seen but frankly this thing shouldn't be even slightly alive, so it should be happy with what it can get.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 11:38:35 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     and attempting to desolder itself from the board.

     So yeah, despite some LEDs being lit, this thing is very fried. I'm gonna stop trying to fix it

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 11:38:36 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     That was an old picture.

     It now looks like this, because as soon as I applied the voltage (at minimum current) it started emitting smoke

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 11:38:37 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     So U4 was an LD1086 low-dropout voltage regular.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 11:44:14 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • FuzzFace ☢️ :clippy:

     @fuzzface I don't think so. The sticker on the front makes me think this was never installed.
     Maybe they were testing for electrical leakage, and discovered it the hardware?

   • FuzzFace ☢️ :clippy: (fuzzface@epsilon-ix.masto.host)'s status on Saturday, 18-Nov-2023 11:44:15 JST FuzzFace ☢️ :clippy:

     in reply to

     @foone Just a guess… water seepage caused a short?

   • philpem (philpem@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 19-Nov-2023 04:20:30 JST philpem

     in reply to

     @foone Ahhh, that'll buff out...

   • philpem (philpem@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 19-Nov-2023 04:22:53 JST philpem

     in reply to

     @foone ...why the heck does a crosswalk button need EIGHT MEGABYTES of flash, holy heck

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 19-Nov-2023 04:53:57 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • philpem

     @philpem various recorded voice lines, I assume

   • vxo (vxo@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 19-Nov-2023 13:53:29 JST vxo

     in reply to

     @foone does the documentation mention a password? I just remember when a bunch were installed in North Bay Village, across from the WSVN studio, and they all periodically said "change password!".

     If it were working you'd also get a nice haptic feedback thump from the button after pressing it. As I recall if you continued touching it, it'd make a series of thumps to signal that the walk sign is on for someone who cannot see or hear the signals!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 19-Nov-2023 14:43:53 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • vxo

     @vxo yeah, the default password is AAAA

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 21-Nov-2023 05:07:30 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Kuraio

     @Kuraio yeah. I suspect it's a combination of trying to make it super-sturdy and just plugging together existing cheap modules.
     Like they probably already had a PIC chip that could stream audio off a flash chip to an amplifier, but instead of making the same chip also do the communications with the controller, they just stuck a second PIC in there

   • Kuraio (kuraio@mstdn.social)'s status on Tuesday, 21-Nov-2023 05:07:31 JST Kuraio

     in reply to

     @foone That's one hell of an over-engineered push button