World's worst tablet computer
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2o8MDCIlOEk
From the Ahmed's Clock school of design. (via Metafilter)The beast in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCRkJquKQiw&t=3m40s
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This guy is funny and that mini USB is awful. Wow they sold this? It looks like glue and spit is the main ingredient is this a medical device?
I wonder if this EEVblog is like blakey of hardware, he finds shitty hardware to review.
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10 kilometers!!!!!
Why does this start in media res?
What a dog's breakfast! I... guess?
Wow I hate this guy so much and he has almost 500k views. What a dog's breakfast.
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I would like to get @HardwareGeek 's input on this.
Wow! Woooooow!
Wow!
Wooooooooooooooooooooooooooow!
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Wait a minute . . a tablet running Windows XP?
According to Wackypedia:
Sales of Windows XP licenses to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) ceased on June 30, 2008, but continued for netbooks until October 2010.
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Running joke in my family is to never buy anything electrical if it comes from .
Seeing the backup battery in that thing was AA-batteries taped together just reinforces that stereotype.
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I would like to get @HardwareGeek 's input on this.
I shouldn't have watched this just before going to bed; I think I'm going to have nightmares.
The power supply board is beyond words; that would get a failing grade as a school project. The rest looks, as the guy said, more like a prototype than a production device; even prototypes will get serial numbers, and it seems to me quite reasonable that there might be 11 or more prototypes built and given to potential customers as samples. However, even prototypes should be assembled by someone who actually knows how to solder; that's some amazingly bad soldering there.
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the backup battery in that thing was AA-batteries taped together
You have yet to appreciate the full horror. That is not a backup battery.
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The power supply board is beyond words; that would get a failing grade as a school project.
I want to see more of it. It's fabulous. I want to see it with the wires removed so you can see its full glory. I shall dream of it.
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Wait a minute . . a tablet running Windows XP?
What's so weird about that? I owned one. Wasn't even expensive.
According to Wackypedia:
Does the video say the tablet was built recently? For all I know, it's from 2007 or whatever.
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Obligatory IT Crowd reference:
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A good physical representation of the WTFy software we see here every day.
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Wow they sold this?
My best bet is that they ended up with a bunch of internal prototypes, and were like "it works? Well then, ship it, what use do we have for those?"
Seeing the backup battery in that thing was AA-batteries taped together just reinforces that stereotype.
To be fair, your typical laptop battery doesn't look much different, other than that it's welded rather than soldered, and it uses 18650 cells and not off-the-shelf AAs.
But soldering a rechargeable AA cell? Last time I checked, that was a rather dangerous venture.
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But soldering a rechargeable AA cell? Last time I checked, that was a rather dangerous venture.
HaHaHa. What do you think about robots equipped with hundreds of STT Li-ion batteries all moving with fast speed and bumping into each other
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A good physical representation of
the WTFy software we see here every dayall software.Let's be honest.
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Why does this start in media res?
I just skimmed the second one but it looks like the first one is just the meat of the second one, cut down.
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But soldering a rechargeable AA cell? Last time I checked, that was a rather dangerous venture.
I've managed to get a non-tab NiMH cell to let go before by soldering to it. I guess the insulator must have melted internally. It was a quick and precise soldering job too, not a butcher job.
Everything gets spot welded now even quick-and-dirty prototypes.
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I'd be happy to have a laptop that used a bunch of standard AA rechargeable cells (in a proper container) instead of a proprietary battery. Is there any valid reason why that wouldn't work?
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Ever had a Sega Game Gear?
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Is there any valid reason why that wouldn't work?
Well, you'd need about 18 of them to replace your standard six-cell battery, for one... And I think they wouldn't last as long being NiMH instead of Li-Ion. And they charge much slower.
Overall, if I were designing a laptop running on replaceable cells, I'd just go with 18650s in a proper container.
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I just skimmed the second one but it looks like the first one is just the meat of the second one, cut down.
Actually, it's the other way around. The first one shows the entire breakdown, the second one just shows the beginning and then has an annotation to the first one.
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I'd be happy to have a laptop that used a bunch of standard AA rechargeable cells (in a proper container) instead of a proprietary battery. Is there any valid reason why that wouldn't work?
I once rebuilt a battery pack for a truly ancient but much beloved Windows 3.11 laptop by replacing its leaking string of twelve tabbed-and-soldered 700mAh AA NiCD cells with a dozen modern 800mAh AAA NiMH cells in proper battery holders.
It looked very tidy but it was astonishingly unreliable. Spring contacts are simply nowhere near as good as soldered tabs.
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Actually, it's the other way around. The first one shows the entire breakdown, the second one just shows the beginning and then has an annotation to the first one.
Oh yeah. Well, that's OP's fault for linking them in the wrong order.
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It looks like glue and spit is the main ingredient
Took Fallout 4 modding recipes literally.
A good physical representation of the WTFy software we see here every day.
We're a company that has a multi-modular product that uses multiple technologies and languages, so that any programmer background will be a good fit.
(in a proper container)
You missed something from that video.
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multi-modular product
multiple technologies and languages
The buzzwords thread is :sting:
Also,
E_LEVERAGES_NOT_FOUND
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@xaade's project is a fork of this:
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O.o
Wow
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I started marking problems I saw, but I quickly began to run out of space.
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I think the tape is used as insulator :) to shield against all those naked wires and solder blobs. I know it because that resembles what I usually end up doing. I am horrible but I (and my bosses) know it good thing my abominations never go beyond my desk/drawer.
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The random blob there clearly has is the remains of a wire.
Frankly I don't know why this doesn't phase me much, probably have seen too much shit over the years. This looks like 95% of electronics out of china.
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This looks like 95% of electronics out of china.
I even get my hobby prototype boards professionally drilled and printed. The payback of sending them out to be professionally done is at like ten of them, so there is no excuse for anything that someone sells.
That board looks like it doesn't even have through-holes in most places. Maybe the wires of the bottom cap go through the board, but almost all of the wire ends are clearly soldered directly to traces. There are holes visible in @abarker's pic (above the green text), but they don't look like they're plated.
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but they don't look like they're plated.
Oh, no. You don't plate at home. Want plated boards? Order from someone who can deal with the chemicals.
I make the first and second prototype myself to take care of the bugs, of course I make a proper board but etch it myself. Once the non-starters are fixed I order a series, just looks so much better.
The 95% of stuff I mentioned may have needed specification, it is stuff like LiPo-chargers and RC-toys, I have done post-mortems on them when they blow up and they all looked like that, even those with straight 230V input.
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Oh, no. You don't plate at home. Want plated boards? Order from someone who can deal with the chemicals.
I even get my hobby prototype boards professionally drilled and printed.
That's precisely what I was suggesting. Etching it yourself is only worth it if you have a crazy time constraint. OSH Park would charge about forty dollars to do three copies of that board - up it to 20 boards and they would charge less than ten dollars each.
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Actually, in the Aussie electronics industry he's got a good reputation for being relatively impartial, and not all of his videos are blatantly critical.
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He also does some great teardown porn as well. The Agilent 20GHz handheld teardown is amazing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QBFIfKlvHU
I love microstrip elements. The most I've designed on that side was a 433MHz antenna that was less susceptible to near-field detuning. Worked great.
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That board looks like it doesn't even have through-holes in most places
Through-hole is so 1990s. They went with the times and did SMD instead!
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The "S" in "SMD" is supposed to stand for "surface", not "scarcely".
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Its not through hole, it's glory hole.
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I love that the name of the company is DEMONISE backwards.
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That's not a board.
That's someone finding a stray piece of fiberglass, and attaching wires to random broken things that fell off of a car. (I know it's silicon, but even that has my doubt)
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I love microstrip elements. The most I've designed on that side was a 433MHz antenna
Admiration, yes; love, no. Even though I'm a EE and licensed Amateur Radio operator, I don't go near that stuff. It's all FBM to me.
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Hey, that's not so bad. I built a board that looked a lot like that once. Designed and etched it myself, soldered it by hand.
I was ten.
I got better.
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To be honest, that doesn’t look atypical for circuit boards in commercial products ca. the 1980s. A few years ago I did a stint of forced labour disassembling all and sundry stuff for recycling and saw a fair number of circuit boards that looked much like that one. 1970s boards tend to be brown instead of green, with larger components and more wires, while 1990s ones usually have smaller components, fewer wires, and are neater, but nowhere near as integrated or miniaturised as those of the 2000s.
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To be honest, that doesn’t look atypical for circuit boards in commercial products ca. the 1980s.
I made boards like that back then. Except I didn't stick wires down with tape, I could solder worth a damn, and I wouldn't solder anything to the leg of another component. Oh, and I took the mounting points for my wires out to the edge of the board.
Whoever did that board was a slovenly ass.
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It doesn't look like it has through holes because it's single-sided. No need to make a double-sided PCB for something that simple.
It would actually be a fairly neat little board if it had been put together a bit more carefully.
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Etching it yourself is only worth it if you have a crazy time constraint.
What, like if you want to be able to do an iteration more than every couple of weeks?