I recently got a Star Trek TOS reproduction tricorder from The Wand Company to accompany my cosplay at the upcoming STLV: Trek to Vegas 2025 convention. But, more important to me right now than getting a costume ready is the contents of this device!

So in this video I do a full teardown; Though this isn’t a tutorial necessarily, as I shot it whilst figuring things out for myself the first time.

My apologies to anyone that would rather I have preserved this NIB. But remember, Lore was disassembled and he turned out fine! Seriously though, as much as I’d love to preserve this in perfect condition, I purchased it to bring it to a con. It’s gonna get banged up and scuffed at least a little bit as it hangs on my hip. So long as I can put it back together again, it should be no worse off in the end.

Sorry for the ruse in the beginning, but I wanted to show my other costume prop option: An AM/FM radio that seems to have been included with a Japan-exclusive TOS DVD box set! That was an eBay find, as I can’t imagine anyone is still handing out analog radios. I couldn’t find much in the way of details on it, so if you know anything about the device please lmk in the comments!

As usual, this video was *not* sponsored nor endorsed by The Wand Company, nor whatever company was behind the AM/FM radio in the 2000s. :)

PCB Images

I did my best to get a nice rectilinear view of all the PCBs at a reasonably high resolution and with even, sharp focus. I was mostly successful. The lighting might seem to be too shadowy, but I had to use a somewhat oblique light to get most of the component markings to appear legible.

However, I didn’t realize until after all the photos were taken and resized that the markings on both Winbond chips were illegible. But both of those appeared in the video, and I included screencaps below, which should hopefully suffice.

All images are in 2 sizes: Medium and Max Resolution. The Medium size is to make it less cumbersome if you just want to take a quick peek at about 1-3MB; The largest of the Max Res photos is about 12MB.

Medium Resolution

Max Resolution

I needed a USB PSU capable of supplying about 85W @ 20V on three separate ports simultaneously (so 255W total). The UGREEN Nexode 300W GaN “Charger” seemed like a good option, as it would have a decent amount of headroom and has a port labeled “140W”, and two “100W”.

However, IMO it’s pure marketing nonsense. First of all, it’s very particular as to what loads you can place on which ports in combination. The only way it can output its rated 300W is if one of those loads is @ 28V. That’s fine, I guess. They can spec it however they want.

These are the various permitted combinations of loads

However, in my testing while loading it with 250W across 4 ports, it started thermally throttling after about 45 minutes. In other words, shutting ports down to save itself from melting down. IMO if it can’t even provide 250W consistently, it should not be sold with a 300W rating. (The testing was performed at about 24°C [75°F], which I think is reasonable.)

In its defense, it does have active PFC and feels incredibly solid. It seemed to be able to provide 200W consistently. But, I would not recommend it unless they change the markings to 200W total and changed the architechure so 200W could be drawn from any combination of ports up to their individual maximum labeling.

While I was searching for a suitable PSU and settling on the UGREEN, I ran across a listing for a “700W” USB-C PSU. Right off the bat, it seemed like an absurd claim. So I purchased it just to take a look and see how much of a BS device it was. It is total crap as one would expect.

Well, not “total” crap. It was able to provide 360W of output for about as long as the UGREEN was able to provide 250W. And it did either thermally throttle outputs (or begin failing intermittently — I’m not sure which) rather than having a meltdown. That being said, the quality of the output was far worse than the UGREEN’s, and it got significantly hotter. (Peaking at about 107°C in one area.) It was untouchably hot after about an hour of loading. Compare that to the UGREEN throttling closer to a 75°C hotspot, and a 65°C average-ish case temperature. (The UGREEN is likely chock full of thermal compound, whereas the 700W no-name had some sparsely strewn about.)

Oh, and the architechture of the “700W” PSU was such that it was essentially 2 completely independent power supplies from the mains to the outputs. So essentially you could only load it to its actual maximum (~360W) by distributing the load across both.

Links to products featured, but this is (obviously) not sponsored, the links are not affiliated, and I don’t recommend you buy either:

UGREEN: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DBZY57ZF
700W: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CMNQMJ9G

I got this Schaffner NSG 200E Interference Simulator mainframe with an NSG 223A module a while back to test a device featured in a previous video. That was quite a while ago, but I finally got around to taking a look at it.

In this video we’ll check out the device’s internals and power it on for the first time in years. Then test some USB power supplies for interference (spike) pass-through.

The USB PSUs were the cheapest I could find for fast delivery from Amazon, at about 4 bucks each. I wanted them to be of questionable quality, but they seemed surprisingly well-made. Though I’m not an expert, I am a fan of ⁨@DiodeGoneWild⁩ and would love to send these over to him for a more thorough analysis if he’d be interested. (Pre-opened and pre-abused, of course.)

Pictures of the Internals

I got this LeCroy WaveRunner 64Xi-A-N Oscilloscope from eBay because I needed a faster scope than my best 200Mhz Siglent model.

On eBay it looked super clean and in good cosmetic shape, and was shown and claimed to be working. When I received it, it would kinda start up, but the display was blank and overall it was unresponsive. When I went to make this video showing the investigation, it powered right up! Strange.

So I figured I’d just be replacing the RTC battery and upgrading the HDD to an SSD. Turns out it already had an SSD and a new battery. The problem was that it would reboot every time the USB ports were even slightly jostled.

After getting the motherboard out (which is standard-ish mini ITX style), it turns out that the PCB is really badly warped. That’s probably leading to cracked and/or damaged traces, possibly in internal layers. I’d wager that’s the cause of the reboots.

I posted this video more for posterity and in case anyone wanted to see an albeit slow teardown. Apologies for the rambly nature, but this really didn’t go according to plan.