MehGuyver: inSite Child Locator edition
27Last week, while I was traveling back from the worlds largest hacker conference, I noticed Meh selling the insite child locators and thought "hey, I bet I could hack those". A few days later, I'm now the proud owner of 6 of these things, and I figured why not bore you all with an account of my adventures! So, here is part 1 of my MehGuyver experience, AKA taking that cheap Chinese shit apart.
The speaker portion comes apart real easy, just unscrew the 4 outer screws (the 4 inner screws just hold the battery box together, you can leave them in and just lift the entire back section off during disassembly). The PCB was stuck (but not glued!) inside, a few seconds of careful prying and it popped out.
The speaker is pretty cheap, but otherwise its a nice little unit. No glue makes it super easy to pick apart, and rubber gaskets indicate someone put at least a little thought into durability:
The PCB seems fairly simple. I don't pretend to understand what all the stuff there is, but I'm pretty sure I can reuse this circuit for something else:
Back almost nothing on it, just pads for the CR2032 batteries & a button:
The button/transmitter portion is also easy to tear apart. 3 screws on the outside get it open. After that, theres a 4th screw holding the board onto the other half of the case, and some more prying to get the battery contacts out of the plastic nubins for the battery holder.
Nothing crazy here:
PCB is pretty boring (and somehow fairly dirty):
Back has a few components as well:
All in all, I was pleasantly surprised. I was expecting the antenna to be fake, but it actually is soldered into some antenna looking portions of the board. There was 0 glue or other impediments you normally have in taking apart modern electronics, this was super easy to take apart, fiddle with, and put back together. This looks like the perfect candidate for the next stage of my plans.....
Stay tuned for Part 2, where I irreparably damage some other household products in pursuit of not having to get my ass out of a chair to hit a button in the next room!
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I applaud this wholeheartedly! (wholeheartmehdly?)
Keep up the great work!
Looking forward to future installments of this series!
Not giving this a MacGyver rating yet as so far it's just a disassembly. Glad to see what the inside looks like already as I too ordered these for nefarious uses and not to track my kids (I have extras...)
@tightwad Enough extra kids to not bother tracking them? I guess if an heir and a spare works for royalty.
@tightwad - It's called family planning. Great foresight!
@tightwad This is just part 1! Wanted to get my disassembly pics up quick, and have you guys motivate me to continue my hackery.
@MrGlass Looking forward to future installments...I haven't done anything more than test the functionality (it rings 5 times) and scare my dog with it
Why bother buying something to track your kids? Doesn't the government supply some kind of implantable wireless tracking device yet?
Aww, how'd you get yours already? I have to wait another week as I'm on travel. I intended to disassemble and evaluate for hacking potential as well. :-)
If you're interested, the PT4302x chip is a multi-function analog converter by Burr-Brown: http://www.datasheetarchive.com/dl/Scans-007/Scans-00149216.pdf
Not having much luck with looking up the couple other visible chips.
Thanks for the great photo of the PCB of the main device- it made looking up stuff a lot easier.
Where's the possum head?
So I bought these to attach to remote controls because they wind up all over the house. But you have to turn the receiver on to use them. And then a little red light blinks, which I assume kills the battery. Are these only useful for short periods of time and not continuous use? Do I need to know when my remote will be going missing to use them?
@sammydog01 perhaps RFID/NFC would work better for that application. Or Tile if you're rich. :D
@sammydog01 No idea what the battery life is, but blinking LEDs probably don't take too much power (I have a watch that gets a few weeks of power off the same battery with a 4 digit LED display
@MrGlass Experiment Time- Start, 8/23, 22:30 @mikeleemm We'll see how long it flashes
I wonder what the battery life is on the receiver...
@mrglass Any follow-ups planned here?
@dashcloud Definitely. I can be a bit slow with my projects (and am going a bit nuts purchasing a house right now) but I have done a bit more work on this.
Unfortunately, the thing I plan on hacking this into isn't nearly as friendly, it had security screws (and not even ones in my 60 piece electronics security screw toolkit) so I had to order a special bit set online. Once that comes, I can get back to working on this.
@MrGlass Thanks for the update! Looking forward to it.