Good morning, all a very strange alarm clock, which i got from lidl: a radio controlled alarm clock. That means it receives time and date, information from cumbria. I think it is uh with temperature and humidity display all in the shape of a strange blue monster. Uh three-year warranty includes batteries, and i got this marked down to just three pounds.

These were clearly not selling. Let's take a look at it here. It is, and it's suitably weird um reasonably large lcd with time day, also temperature in fahrenheit. That's no good! How do you change that to celsius there? We are you press the up button celsius and relative humidity in percentage terms and to help you see this display there's a little light touch sensor on the top which puts on a blue backlight.

It also doubles as the snooze button for the alarm clock function. Well, um. It's got the date and time from the msf transmitter which, as i say, is up in cumbria. In fact, let's just have a quick look at the manual for this thing.

Yes, the msf radio signal is transmitted from a location near now is that anthon or anthon could be either county cumbria and, interestingly, this manual is for the great british one - ireland, northern ireland, but also germany, austria and switzerland. If you go to the same page in the german section, i was assuming this would say that the signal is the dsf. I think it's called dsf from somewhere in germany, but no it says das, msf, funk signal viet austin near from anthon. I think it must be antoine.

It can't be anthon grafshaft cumbria, so the german one presumably also uses the cumbrian um radio signal. Now these symbols here that radio sort of dish thing flashes when it's trying to acquire the signal, if it flashes, but there are no of these lines coming out of the dish. It's not receiving a signal when you start seeing these lines, it is receiving a signal and you might have to take this to different rooms in the house in order to get it to receive the signal and then eventually, this all stabilizes, and that means it's received. The signal and it's synchronized to that time signal this thing is a tiny little box that says dst, so i presume that's daylight, saving time lights up when it's summertime.

Oh it's just turned 11 o'clock on tuesday. Let's um have a look inside here now. What are we expecting to find? Well, there is a touch sensor up here for the light. Um there's also a temperature and humidity sensor in here somewhere and, of course, there's the uh radio receiving antenna.

So we're looking for all those things in the back appear to be three screws: let's take them out well they're out, but that doesn't seem to have got this thing to come apart. I can slightly split that but something's holding it together and i don't quite know what it is. So i think these two arms need to come off and there are some holes down there. I think brute force is needed, but brute force doesn't seem to be doing a lot.

I'm trying to remove these arm sections and they're just not coming off hmm and i've removed one of the plates from under the feet, but nothing in there. So i continue using brute force. Well, one of the arms is off and i do see some slots and some clips, so let's try and get, but it does appear to have been glued on with a bit there. So i'll try and get the other arm off.

Although, oh, yes, there's a screw in there, okay, that's fine and with the arms off and the two remaining screws taken out. Yes, it comes apart. It splits that way. Oh well now there's the antenna.

It looks like one of those uh old ferrite cord uh. Am radio transmission antennas. Tell me what the frequencies are for uh time clock signals, but i think they're pretty low. There's the touch sensor.

Oh, it's literally a piece of tin, foil or copper-colored foil, with a wire running down to the board. There's a crystal uh there, which is probably to set the clock frequency. Oh there's another crystal there. Actually, i wonder if that's related to the radio um, here's the temperature sensor, which is interesting.

That's a discrete temperature sensor, thermistor, here's, the humidity sensor, which is just carbon tracks on a little board, no special purpose sensor for this to keep the cost down. I suppose there's the little buzzer stroke speaker for the alarm, clock function, battery compartment and that's pretty much it there's, probably a blob chip on the back of this board. Should we take a look and the board is out and the lcd backlight has fallen away. Now.

Here's the lcd, let's peel, that off the zebra strip. Oh that's, come off! Will that all realign, possibly possibly not and there's our blob chip, but actually there are a couple of other chips so we'll take a look at those. So u1 is the blob chip that has the larger of the crystals coming through from the other side of the board. There's a transistor there, that's next to the wires going to the light.

So that's probably the light driver switch there's what looks like a regulator here. It is near the incoming power connections here uh, it does say 33 on it. So possibly it's a 3.3 volt regulator, but then the battery is only three volts, so i'm not quite sure what that's doing. There's a chip here, um or was it 14 pin.

It's called a zr 6100 can't find anything specifically on that, but it's clearly the msf chip there's a couple of legs there for the smaller of the two crystals next to that um. So that's presumably doing the time code, um, stuff and receiving or yeah receiving from the uh and the ferrite core antenna here into that. And then that runs into the chip and the chip uses that time code signaling little transistor down here by the switches not entirely sure what that's doing um, possibly connected with the lcd driver array there. But that's pretty much all! That's in here time, code, msfd code, stuff, main cpu, doing lcd and driving and time clock counting uh, all in real time, with a real-time crystal and possibly a regulator here or some sort of power related component here.

That's all that's inside this monstrosity will it all go back together and function? Well, i'm about to find out so quite surprised to see a separate, thermistor and humidity sensor, but i guess that's the way to keep the price down rather than some integrated chip to just have two cheap off-the-shelf components and then some sort of calibration stuff in software. That's the only thing that really surprised me: let's put the batteries back in see if it works, yep looks like it does: snooze buttons still work, yeah the stuff on the display makes sense. Oh can i change that to celsius? No, i don't think you can actually until it's either stopped trying to acquire a signal or actually acquired. One doesn't seem that these buttons do anything you can press and hold.

I think down tells it don't bother with the radio thing i'll set the clock manually and there is a process. Oh even that doesn't seem to work while it's trying to acquire, but there is a process to manually set this. Why you'd bother? I don't know best to just find somewhere in your house where it does get a radio signal and it sets the clock for you now. I don't know if this blue monster thing is a known character.

If you know, please let me know or whether it's just some sort of arbitrary design monster, which nobody knows, and that probably explains why nobody bought this thing and why it was reduced and cheap. But it lets us take a look inside and see the bits that we're expecting to see. Doesn't it i'll just go and put it somewhere where i can receive that radio signal it does seem in the kitchen here it is receiving that radio signal i'll leave it for a little bit until it synchronizes and with it out here it does seem to be Getting a consistent radio receive signal, because if i move my phone near to it, i'll probably block the radio, but you can see the little bars coming out of the receiver antenna. So i think if i leave it here for a while, it will synchronize and there we are it's synchronized.

11, 38 tuesday, daylight saving those have stabilized. What can we see here? Uh 26 degrees celsius? What does down do don't think it does anything mode. You can get seconds instead of the day. That's the date 27th of the 7th 27th of july and the alarm is off, and so that's, what's inside the blue monster alarm clock which you might be able to get for three pounds from lidl: cheerio.