Gadgetory

we're back it's the final day of CES I'm bill Detweiler and this is my partner in crime Jason Heiner I'm managing editor of Czech Republic and I like to take products apart and see what makes them tick if you will today we're going to crack open a hoverboard or more appropriately called a self balancing scooter to see what's inside of them and to explain sort of what's going on with the fires has everybody out here heard about the fires that are happening with the hoverboards right ok so what I'm going to do is we're going to take one apart we're going to look at components inside of the board and try to show people why they're catching fire and hopefully make everybody a little bit more safe so while I'm doing this Jason is going to do the play-by-play here um Jason can tell everybody why we take things apart oh and just in case anybody's worried about a fire on the stage right now we have Katie over here with the fire extinguisher so if anything when it bursts into flames she's gonna run up here and put it out but hopefully hopefully we won't have that happen all right so Jason while we've been taking things apart all these shows we've been doing this for a long time we started doing these in 2006 and the you know the first couple things that we took apart were the Xbox and before Xbox 360 or this was right about the time the Xbox 360 the first one was coming out and the iPod one the iPad Mini at that time and we have a an audience at Tech Republic that's very technically curious and we we simply took them apart because there are always questions especially back in that time in tech there were lots of questions about you know what processors were used how much storage what vendors were involved and we would take these things apart we'd look at the tips that were inside look at the technology that was inside and we break it down so we've got the first so I'll say this I fudged a little bit I cheated I took some of the screws out in the UH in order to save time and usually we use really really small screws and tools like this but today we roll out the power tools now we've got the cowlings off they come off pretty easily there's just a bunch of screws inside now this is the most important thing people if you're going to do this at home and I do not recommend it please don't try this at home now um the first thing you want to do whenever you're taking apart something that's electric is to disconnect the battery so you guys can see I'm going to try to shooting it in the camera so don't you can see up on the screen or not I'll tilt it forward just a little bit this large object here is the battery this is a large lithium ion battery and this is what's responsible for the fire so the first thing I'm going to do before I touch anything else inside of this is I'm going to disconnect the battery that will hopefully prevent me from getting electrocuted and from a fire starting and they'll cracked open a lot of devices never had a fire never Alexian fingers ten toes but it's these batteries that are what's causing the fire and then we're going to talk about the hardware a little bit inside there's there's a couple reasons why these batteries can catch fire one is if I were to take something that's like this really sharp and start poking these batteries it would expose the chemicals inside the batteries and that is bad that'll cause batteries to explode the other thing is if these batteries overheat so if they're exposed to something that's really hot if you're on a hoverboard and you have a crash that could puncture the battery also the batteries can can be cheaply made there's something called thermal runaway where if the separation material between the anode and the cathode is just not aligned properly or isn't manufactured properly you can have a thermal runaway inside the battery which is which causes it to overheat and burst into fire also so this is something that's really interesting about the hoverboards Jason open this box up here yes and I'm not singling this particular brand out this model out as a potential fire risk or not but open the box up there alright and Jason's going to pull out while I'm doing this I'm going to disconnect some of these cables here so this is the charger that it comes with now so you would say Millie er yeah you would think that you could just plug this up and leave this overnight right and then you'd have an brand-new charge hoverboard in the morning no you can't do that if you'll look Jason lift up some of the paper right there there's a real little piece of paper okay and it says important do not charge hoverboard overnight or at risks exploding now you know it's one thing it's nice I'm sure that the lawyers are very happy that they put this piece of paper in there but if you've got one of these for one of your kids and they just forget and leave it plugged up in the garage or the living room you know that's probably not you know it's not going to help you any because there's this piece of paper in there so all right now we've talked about the battery any kind of thing is saying it's essentially saying stay by this thing all the time when you're when you're charging it right because it might burst into flames not very practical right so we're going to pop off a few of these cables here there's a lot of electronics actually inside these devices are to make them work right there are things like there's obviously cables connecting to the charging ports there's LED lights on these things there's actually quite a bit of hardware that you might find in a smartphone or in other sort of Google devices there are at least three microcontrollers in here there's one from STMicroelectronics there's two separate six access gyroscopes it's very hard to see so I don't expect but these chips here one here and one here are actually Invensys InvenSense six access gyroscopes and there's they they're what helps the scooter stay level and balance itself also there the motors for these are inside the wheels so if you took the wheels apart you took these bolts out you can see of the motors and then down here you'll see at least one arm this is a I believe of 78 megahertz arm cortex-m three microcontroller and then another set of microcontrollers another two microcontrollers up there so there's a lot of hardware inside these devices that help them go now while we're doing this what we're going to do is I'm going to keep keep taking this apart to show you guys a little bit more of the hardware that's inside now like Jason said we've been doing this for a really long time we've taken apart everything yes from my iPads iPhones every uh you know mobile device you can think of every gaming can work on selected open and really there's a couple goals that we have when we're when we're doing these you know one is the curiosity factor it is the idea of you know learning from the technology learning about the design of these things you can tell a lot about these products from the design I remember times Bill cracking something open and saying come look at this you know inside there's chase holding some of these devices together I remember particularly an HTC device that you were not very impressed with that came to market very quickly and you could tell just by the way it was organized inside that this product was rushed to market you know the on the other hand you can tell devices not surprisingly devices from companies like Samsung and Apple that you've often be very impressed with looking at at the design inside of the device so it's not Universal but every time that we do when these devices we learn a little bit about the company and about the you know the what they put into the the product so we also are looking at how well these devices can be repaired if you had the device break if you had something that either through your own fault or something that was out of warranty and you wanted to try to repair it yourself you know we we look at it and we try to give you some idea of what you would do if a screen cracked if a part had to be replaced on your own and so we give you a little bit of insight onto how easy or hard or even possible or not possible it would be to fix it on your own yeah and it's a lot easier for me to sort of justify taking something like this apart than it is for somebody at home just to do it on their own so you don't have to we do it so you don't have to and later today I mean this guy so sometimes these little plastic connectors are hard to get off um but later today we'll actually be doing something that we normally don't do so we taking apart an Apple pencil and in order to take apart the Apple pencil we we'll actually have to destroy it I'll be cutting it in half on the stage up here which should be fun that is something you know not everybody is necessarily good at this kind of thing if you have a lot of it you have to have a lot of patience you have to have a certain amount of dexterity you know Bill has been doing these you know since we started he's did the first ones he's the one who still does all of these because he has a lot of patience he also kind of has like the hands of the surgeon you know very very dexterous and you know you're cracking these things open sometimes especially if they have screens it takes a while to figure out how to get them open I mean when we famous picture out there on the internet that when we were first trying to get the very first iPad apart we had all kinds of things stuck down in there what do you have you're like a spatula you know butter knife you had all kinds of things now there are some tools that have come out some nice tool sets from people like iFixit then you can go and you can get your own set of tools that can help you you know get these devices open but you know I can count on the number of fingers you know the the amount of things you've actually taken apart like doesn't that have broken do you also put them back together because you're trying to learn from that and then in what you pass on to to people afterwards when you write it up people often ask me well you ruined a perfectly good iPhone or you ruined a perfectly good device that's a no I usually don't you you can there are plenty of people that will actually take devices down to the chip substrate you know and destroy the devices I don't do that this one's really tough we always try to get them back together in working order so that we can test them and so that we can use them so most I always tell people that it makes them feel a little bit better like we just didn't trash the device now the Apple pencil there's no way to do this without breaking it you can see here this is the controller board for the device I I don't want to cut through all the wires I wouldn't do that but you can kind of see the complexity that that it has here you can see the processor I showed earlier and all these big things these are the things that I try to stay away from a lot of these capacitors they can store power I don't want to be touching all of those also we try to be really careful with our own electrostatic safety and our safety in general when we're taking these things apart we try to use electrostatic ESD safe tools and that way you know we we don't ruin the devices when we're when we're taking them apart I'm going to try and get the these housing out sit there there are these plastic pieces here to see what's under there and this is a really great example sometimes when I take these devices apart we know what's going to be inside them sometimes we don't know what's going to be inside them sometimes we're just sort of fly-in blind we don't know how they're going to come apart and so we always take a lot of photos as we're going through the process to make sure not just to show everybody what's inside them and talk about them but to actually be able to put them back together again when we're done with them and then you know use them we are the most prominent devices you know you can go and see that process for most of the problems you know most prominent devices that are available on the market Microsoft Surface you know iPads iPhones Samsung phones you can see the whole process where bill is taken apart and then he'll post the gallery he'll do a video and he'll often do an analysis post to where he is explaining you know what he learned in the process keeping track of all these screws is not fun either some of these devices will use up to what three four five six seven different kinds of screws the worst for that yes if anyone from Apple is listening please just use one type of screw we can Oh uh so is anybody here been hoping that this thing might burst into flames and you might actually see it burst into flames yeah me too um so we're so we're safe so far um but you know one of the things you may be wondering is why they call this a hoverboard right it's not act when it's not actually hovering when I think hoverboard I think of the thing that Marty McFly went in Back to the Future 2 is 5050 or was 2015 yes yes so um I don't know exactly why they call it a hoverboard when in fact it's just sort of a wheeled skateboard but there it is and sometimes you run into problems like this this connector looks like it has glue on it some kind yeah as a sealant on it and they don't want to come loose so you have to improvise as you're going along and pop it loose otherwise I'll break the middle contacts what I really don't necessarily want to do that is if you're doing it on this up on your own like we were saying earlier you know patience is kind of the key a lot of these things they don't want to come and you're your inclination a lot of times is to force it that would be what I would do like I would never have the patience for it but you know Bill and others that these kinds of things exactly you know just have enough patience as they keep working it little by little and then it comes apart so we can kind of see we've almost got this sort of broken down I mean kind of see most of the major components inside of it if you guys can kind of see this I'll show you you can see the wheels you can see the mounting brackets here for the wheels the battery we can see the large sort of circuit board here mounted to its own sort of backing plate you see all the cables that run through it and how the the swivels work here in the center and how these sort of balance themselves I mean it really is kind of an neat and interesting device has anybody out there actually ridden one of these anybody I wouldn't yet did you fall down at least once or twice knows it was easy okay pretty easy I've never actually ridden one of these things so I really did think of thought about trying to ride this before we came out here but decided that I didn't want to risk the fire hazard before I had it something also interesting about these um you know because the lithium-ion batteries if you tried to move it around the airline wouldn't let me bring it on the airplane to bring it out to Las Vegas so I had to ship it ground you know it can't even go on an airplane or a boat the first time we tried to ship at air they sent it back the first time we tried to ship it they actually sent it back and said no you've got to put this on a truck and I said okay um but it's this is one of those things this is probably one of the largest things we've taken apart in the past year I've done some really interesting things in the CNN magazine there were some copies of it out there you can see one of our tear downs we've taken apart the Amazon echo we've taken one of the parrot drones apart we've taken apart a we've got a new one coming up in the next issue of the magazine that'll be really exciting so stay tuned for that we've taken apart dr. ball yeah we took apart an indeed a soccer bar one of the my coach smart soccer balls that was really cool because there's a lot of Technology the same technology that's in here rate these the gyroscopes the accelerometers they're in the soccer ball you can and they're so small these days they require so little power that you can put them in almost anything you don't need great big batteries like this anymore to you know to power those types of devices so that's what makes technology like this popular I mean remember this is basically you know a Segway right it's just a smaller Segway note you guys all remember when segways first come out how expensive they were there's a reason you can buy this so I bought this for 350 bucks at a grocery store not even electronic shop you didn't have to go there I walked into the grocery store and I said oh here's a big you know here's a big display of these things so we were able to pick them up but for that price because they're so you know the technology has come down in price so much since then that it's you know companies are able to make these things let's just hope they make them sort of safely you know the last thing I'll leave you with before we sort of wrap up here it's just these the batteries like I talked about before so if you do have one of these what should you throw it away should you not let your kids drive it not necessarily I'm not saying that I don't mean to say that all of these are unsafe but there are certain considerations you should have when you buy them right so for example you shouldn't if the manufacturer says you shouldn't charge it overnight don't charge it overnight make sure that you're buying them from the reputable vendor from one that seen it has put out some reviews of them check that out make sure that you're buying them directly from the vendor and maybe not through a third party if you do have one and you're concerned about it you know send it back contact the reseller sometimes they'll give you their money back if it's a a good vendor for example I know a lot of people that bought these from Amazon and they sham right back in Amazon gave them credits right away but do that otherwise you know just use it safely and probably you know don't keep it in your garage you know keep it keep it keep it outside on the garage well same same reason just don't keep it in the living room either if someone were to leave it plugged up overnight and it was to overheat and get overcharged then it's a little bit safer if it starts a fire and it's outside or somewhere as opposed to being in your house or in your garage if you look at the news stories you've seen the photos of people of these under the Christmas tree right with the Christmas tree and everything caught on fire so that's the last thing I'll kind of say about that not to say that these are all unsafe others you should you know immediately Chuck the one you have but just so that you're aware and you can make an educated decision as a consumer so if you will want to get in the audience want to get one of these anybody wanting to get one of these hoverboards what's right what's the one guys already Galant right it's not to say that the technology itself is the technology itself is not unsafe other than falling off and bumping your head right it's just that a lot of these are cheaply made they come from the quality control during the manufacturing process isn't as tight as it should be on the batteries or on the rest of the components so you haven't really heard of a lot of fires with segways right or you don't hear you know a lot of fires anymore with laptop batteries these days it's because the manufacturing processes for those batteries are tighter the quality controls are tighter and so that's why you know you just have to know where you're buying the front