Good morning, all today, water, animal repeller with motion sensor. This came from lidl, parkside brand uh right. Let's get this open and take a look at what's inside and inside we have a sort of unit with a pir window there uh on the bottom. We have a sort of watery input with a mesh filter there on the top.

I guess that's the watery output on the back. There is a knob which is probably a potentiometer, and you can adjust that from oh zero right up to well. Whatever the top number is nine. Now batteries, they must go in here.

Oh there's a sort of sealed compartment: oh yeah, four double a's go in that water. Sealed compartment. Yeah two covers over that so that um, the batteries don't get wet batteries in here. Oh more batteries there and this device, which i presume if it's on the top, which is mechanically incredibly complex, that's going to be really interesting to have a look at and that almost might warrant a video all of its own uh spike and main hose lock, compatible Water input ooh the molding's a bit suspect there a little bit of flashing on there manual and what's this stuff, a tube and an adapter whatever they do.

So it looks like it goes like this. Water inlet, some sort of cap forces water up this bit. Of extension, pipe into the body of the unit now this must have some sort of uh six volt water valve triggered by the pir. Then there's an adapter on the top here and then there's the water spray thing.

I think the idea of this thing and we'll take a closer look at this is that it rotates uh and then it changes direction very interesting mechanism on here. So let's have a look at that. Well so far, i've worked out that there's a mechanical bi-stable um, which works by pushing this into two positions. So it's stable in that position and stable in that position.

So my guess is - and you can adjust these things, so, let's bring these around so the bi-stable has a relatively short travel. You click it one way you click it the other way. Now, i'm guessing that the idea is to redirect the water flow so that it oscillates backwards and forwards like this. But at the moment i can't quite see how this piece redirects the water flow.

It looks like it runs up through here and then there's an adjuster here, it's a very crude adjuster, but you can adjust the screw there, which slightly adjusts the position of this green thing. But i still haven't quite got my head around how this works so i'll keep looking well just for the moment. I can't fathom this. At all i mean i can see, there's a bi-stable action which brings this lock in and out from the green piece.

So when the locks in the green piece pulls the head round when the lock disengages, i assume something makes it go the other way. But i can't quite see what that is. Unless this relies on sort of chaotic motion and there's a constant chaotic motion going on. But yeah that's completely unfathomable and the problem i've got is that i don't have an outside tap anymore, because we had a lead, pipe feeding the house that leaked and we had it replaced with a plastic pipe and when they fitted the plastic pipe, we lost our Outside tap because of some complexity with the plumbing - and we don't have an outside tap now, so i can't actually feed water through this under pressure and see what it does i'll have to come back to this, perhaps we'll get on with the electronics now right.

So this thing has six screws holding it together. Uh, i think they're positive yeah, so let's undo those six screws right. So i'm in we've got battery compartment lots of sealant to seal water out of the electronics. The pot is actually controlled by a an extension piece.

There to the dial on the back, so that should be reasonably well water sealed now there are two wires going off to a solenoid which you can see down there and i thought well that's going to make this very awkward, but i think this just pulls out. Actually it does so now we can see how the solenoid piece works. Now i thought this was going to have a very clever motorized actuator, which used very little power. It doesn't.

It has a whopping great solenoid, which is going to use a lot of current, but, of course the thing about this is it's not on for long. It's triggered by motion by an animal walking past it. It's only going to be on for 10 15 seconds, perhaps so it can get away with having a solenoid controlled actuator to allow the water through, because it simply isn't going to be drawing current for very long. So, yes, it is simply a big whopping, great solenoid, which allows water through this pipe a board here, which is completely potted, there's very little to see it's potted up to the base of these electrolytic capacitors.

There are a couple of eight pin chips on there. I'm not even sure whether i'm going to be able to see the part numbers of those there's, this pot, which has masses and masses of black gunk around it, to try and keep the water out of this pcb a couple of small electrolytics here. There's a 101 brown black brown well at first thought. I thought it was an inductor because it's got that sort of inductor shape, but actually i think it's a resistor because there's um r16 next to it.

So i think that's a resistor. So there's not a lot to see here and because it's so heavily potted, it's probably um. If we take this module out, which looks like it might come out, we'll see the pir sensor on the other side. But there isn't a lot to see here.

I will have a go at these screws and see if this comes out so inside here we've got the um. This is essentially a fresnel or fresnel lens. It's multiple lenses on there, so that, if you have one moving object, you get multiple images of it. Moving across the sensor and then there's a pir detector here, there's also this device here i don't know whether that's an led or a photodiode.

I can't imagine there's any need for a photodiode, because this needs to work at night as it does during the day. So i don't know whether maybe that changes the sensitivity of this. If this is a photodiode, it could also be an led. It might just light up the lens here in a i, don't know, green or red color.

Possibly, i don't know um, possibly if i put some batteries in this and activate it, we can see whether that thing illuminates now these two eight pin ics this one has no markings on it, but it's clearly something to do with the pir sensor, which i think Is these three pins here the little led or possibly photo transistor? Is these two connections down here this one? You can read it's an l9110 and that is a dual channel. Um h bridge motor driver chip - i don't know whether it's dual channel in and of itself or whether, yes, i think it is dual channel um. But anyway, you put in pulse width, uh signals on the input, and then you get mosfet controlled controls on the output and why it needs that did does this solenoid need to be energized first in one direction and then, in the other, we'll probably hear that when We put batteries in it, but uh that's what that is l 9110 right, i'm going to put this back in its box because there isn't a lot to see here and the circuit board's pretty straightforward, um. Really.

The next thing is whether or not we can hear anything. So, let's put that back in there, i've got to get that solenoid to fit in there. The pot control knob needs to remate with the pot which it seems to have done right. Let's get the screws back in right, let's put the supplied, uh batteries in ah that's interesting.

It looks to me like these are paralleled for more current, probably to drive, because you've got a pair going that way. Yes and they're, they're um paralleled at both ends by the metal work, so these cells are being used in parallel. So this is a three volt system. Does it say three volt? Well, it just says four times: 1.5 volt, but it looks like the circuit runs on three volts and i have seen other ones because i looked at a couple of youtube videos of these things before i started this and they seemed to be three volts.

So obviously they decided that um single cells didn't provide enough current uh. Is that the right way around? Yes, i think it is. Oh, that's an led because i just saw a red light come on so now we've got to try and trigger this thing. Waiting for i've got a feeling, those pirs take a while to um balance.

Don't they, i can't remember i'll, wait a bit and see if it triggers i'll leave the camera running and edit this down afterwards. Oh there's, actually a a rubber bead around there. That's interesting to keep the water out slide that thing on so just waiting now until the pir uh detects me or something and we hear the solenoid go. Oh, i wonder if the sensitivity needs to be raised which i might be able to trigger just through that.

Not hearing a solenoid clunk, oh yeah, there we go, i heard a clunk, so the red light's on it's clicked and it's dropped out. So it looks like the solenoid is pulled first one way and then pulled the other way and the timing is about five seconds or something like that. Yes, that's interesting, so you can see the reason for the h bridge driver the solenoid is pulled one way and then pull back the other way. Or is it just released it's hard to tell there's a very positive clunk when it's pulled in and there's more of a sort of bounce feel to it when it drops out? So maybe it's just energized one way and de-energized the other, but yeah a very definite solenoid clunk, when this thing switches the water on so back to this thing, it's really interesting.

Um water appears to just run up this tube up this slightly angled piece here and out of a nozzle there. Now, with the green piece in its rest position, the tendency is going to be for this to rotate this way like that and that when it triggers the bi-stable means that the little hook there is is pulling this thing around. So i can only assume that there's chaotic motion which gradually pulls this round until the bistable is tripped like that, and then this disconnects completely from the um, the black plastic part. And then i assume that the the the jet deflection, because the jet runs up this green thing here, pushes this all the way back and then you get this chaotic motion again, which lashes it this way and then it pushes it all the way back.

But how fast it does i've looked at some videos of these things and they just seem to be all over the place. Then there's this thing, which looks it doesn't seem to be connected with the water jet in any way. It just looks like you can set. This is a cam.

You can set it so that either doesn't interfere with the jet of water coming out or it does by simply adjusting the camera so that this pushes down a bit further and the jet of water. Just nudges the tip of that, but it's a very strange design. This must have been a design, that's been sort of perfected over the years and it just works. But it's a really strange thing: it's not immediately obvious how it works other than if there's chaotic motion.

So that's all i can assume there is. I can't test this because i have no method of creating pressurized water and we we can't even fit a hose pipe to one of the taps inside the house, because all the taps in the house are of a type where you can't just fit a clamp type Hose adapter on so i've got no pressurized water other than i recently bought a or what's it called a pressure washer. I suppose i could attempt to interface the pressure washer nozzle, although it's not any kind of standard with this and see how this works, but that would take a little while to set up. So i think, for this video there's not much more, i can do i'm gon na have to say cheerio.

.