the better frothers use a magnet mounted to the motor with a magnetic whisk like the nespresso units, although they have some quality issues too. Just to note if you ever try to open a nespresso frother, they split in the middle and the base is ultrasonically welded. Don't find that out the hard way like me 🙃
My Bodum frother uses the magnetic coupling approach and it works really well. I also haven’t had it for very long and I don’t use it much so who knows how long it’ll actually last.
Vibrate two pieces of plastic with some somewhat specific geometry together sutch that they heat up, melt a little and stick together. It’s cheaper than fasteners, easy to mold and more secure than snaps
My friend has a milk frother similar to this, but I'm guessing a more recent model. The milk frothing spring thing is just held in the middle of the jug by a peg and it's rotated magnetically, without a direct connection to the motor beneath. There is no shaft going through the base of the milk "compartment", so it should never leak like this did.
My mother got one of these exact frothers, it died within a couple of weeks. I wish I could have seen inside it but she just returned it back to amazon and got a free replacement which has been working fine for the better part of a year now. I guess now is my chance to see what's inside! Thanks for the content man!
We got a Swan brand deep fat fryer.It died in about 10 seconds - on a 'dry run'. Yes, thankfully I'd ignored the instructions to not put it on without oil in it, thankfully, so it wasn't all sticky. Took the bottom off it and found a 5mm long lenticular plastic pin that linked two metal linkages apart in the thermostat. The two metal pieces having a hole in them for the ends of the plastic pin. So rough transit must have taken place as the pin had bounced out of one of these locating holes and was therefore effectively longer than it should have been. Once back correctly in the hole and put back together, it worked fine for a number of years. Deep fat fryers became popular in the 1980s due to the number of chip pan fires burning houses down. We had a chip pan - used twice a week and not one fire. So it was somehat ironic that the deep fat fryer, when it failed a few years later due to a bad electrical contact, the connection overheated, melted the base plastic and fell through onto the worktop making two burn marks ! Since then, it's been oven chips ! Story 2 Back in the day - late 1970s (age ~13-14) after school, I'd go with a school friend to his house. As his dad worked shifts, he'd be home to make meals for his kids. One day while I was there we smelt smoke - his dad had gone out and left the chip pan on and when we went into the kitchen the top of the pan was all flame. I just put the lid on and moved it to a cold electric hob ring. We then went back into the living room - when my friend's sister came in and said "What's that smell?" We explained - and went back into the kitchen - I took the pan lid off again and the pan once again burst into flames - so she could see what we had !
Very helpful! My Lidl frother quit heating after only one use. My bf knew you had a video of one, so we dismantled it and were very inspired by your detailed explanations. The problem was with the heating element fuse.
I always appreciate your autopsys. I found anything in a moist environment must be waterproofed before use. I had a Chamberlain P.I. driveway alert which started going off with nothing in range. I opened the transmitter to find water had condensed inside the “water resistance” box. I dried it then used clear enamel to waterproof the board and petroleum jelly to protect the battery connections. It has been working great for 9+ years so far.
The board has HT46R005 silk screened on which immediately returned a result for a "Holtek Small Package 8-bit OTP MCU". It has a fairly extensive looking datasheet for what it can do. the ToC is 4-5 pages alone. "The HT46R005 HT48R005 are a series of 8-bit high-performance, RISC architecture microcontrollers specifically designed for a wide range of applications." It looks pretty capable.
These small Holtek micros are basically Microchip PIC16 (i.e. 14 bit core) clones. Same instruction set (but different assembler mnemonics), same pipeline architecture giving one clock per cycle at one quarter of the clock rate, same memory map etc. They are very cheap though, single digit cents cheap.
@@bigclivedotcom hey Clive I have a aircraft led corn cob style warning light meant for a tower that I used as a driveway light for 8 or so years that has finally died. Do you have a P.O. Box I’ll send it to you
mm got to love those crusties from moisture fun. reminds me of one of my auto soap dispensers. water and soap got in and corroded some spots and the sort one of the battery terminals was snapped off. so i cleaned it up then super heated soldered into the broken tab and let it melt down and fuse into the plastic and metal as a new contact point added 2 part epoxy to all of the wires and switch parts. been a year so far so good. i checked other one i owned lucky its fine so i reinforced it as well for good measure.
If there's a shaft coming in from the bottom, leaking is just inevitable. Had a few machines that do this and they all leaked eventually and ruin the bearings, thus end of life since you can't rebuild them.
I just love these teardowns, reverse engineering with diagrams and all round reviews of ordinary household electronics and their internals. Thanks so much for sharing. 😎👌🏼
I've had a lot of these! The ones from Amazon last about six months and get replaced under warrantee. They all stop heating. The Lidl version lasted a good bit longer and has a much longer guarantee. Both have identical bases so I guess are from the same factory.
That's exactly like one i purchased on Amazon. Made in China, and rebranded for various vendors, apparently. The heating element went out on mine, but it still froths cold. i'm giving it away tomorrow, since i purchased an upgrade. By the way, the button is designed to give a hot foam option (or just heated with the other stirrer) with a quick button press, or a cold foam option with a 2 second press.
I enjoy Thomas Nagy's videos, although he has generated less content recently. Perhaps it is the lack of frothed milk that has been the issue. (My kettle failed recently... very sad to see it has a non-replaceable element... no option apart from land fill... disposable things seem to be the way of the world... poor planet)
why are people on youtube always talking about "landfills" ? Whats up with getting it to recycling instead in other countries ? There are no landfillings allowed since 2004 around here, only completely inert materials (rubbel) and before that it was already highly regulated.
Had a similar issues with a morphy richards unit, Horrible corrosion inside which i assume came in through the motor base seal. The tiny tactile switch was smaller then anything I had in stock so I did a search and found a box of 250 assorted tactile switches costing $10.00AU from a vendor on Ebay. The unit I looked at had the NTC thermistor glued into a receptacle which was welded into the bottom of the jug. The Kettle ( part of a set I was told ) had five different temperatures which were accessible through five push button ( tactile ) switches on the base unit. When I checked the kettle, It used the same MCU as the milk jug so I guess morphy richards simply program the MCU for whichever product it is installed in...
My Lavazza milk frother uses the sealed removable jug/magnet method, so liquid can't leak into the base. It's very effective, but you need to use full fat milk for a decent froth!
It looks like it would be a pretty good quality unit if they would waterproof the board. Like potting it then using wires to the pushbutton rather than board mounted.
I saw only one time good froth cup, that had no direct contact between that whipper and motor, instead it have magnets on both sides that rotate on some teflon-like surface. Only problem was that rotating bits inside cup had really crappy mount for that whipper so after some time it start wobbling and at the end it broke. But beside that, thanks to no holes inside there where no corrosion at all.
Apart from trivial cosmetic differences it appears identical to the units ALDI Australia sells as companions to their coffee pod machines. Our unit at work appeared to suffer from similar problems with water ingress and corrosion but my inspection wasn't as thorough due to running out of patience at the spudger stage and completing disassembly with a railway point clip. No serviceable parts were found after that...
Excellent teardown, now I know what’s inside this! I have this device, I believe that it does go through several heat cycles, at least 2-3. Maybe there is a minimum time threshold between the heater turning off and back on? No idea.
I had two units of a more or less similar design (Silver Crest) from Lidl. Both died within the 3 years warranty period of milk ingress into the motor (via the shaft). Got my money back in both instances. 😃 Pushing the button for 3 seconds wil start stirring the milk without heating. If I could find fitting motors I could easily revive them... the ingress issue might be addressed by a thin disc on the shaft, spinning any leakage out of harms way.
Clive, the MCU reference seems to be written on the board in huge letters 😉: ht46r005 I googled it and apparently the manufacture is Holtek Semiconductor which I never heard of before. Edit: in the datasheet of ht46r005 they show a 10 pin package however...🤷♂️
By the way, Clive missed the part number of the MCU. It's a Holtek HT46R003. He didn't even need to read the package, it was on the silkscreen (having a camera recording makes us miss these sorts of things haha).
Thanks for the autopsy intreresting to see another brand, I have a different but functionally very similar milk heater/frother that quickly died. It was the last available so I could get a refund but not a new one. It was hard to dismantle but it turned out to be the small transformer 240 pri / 9V-0-9V sec that had died, the primairy windings cut somewhere. I only managed to find a slightly larger transformer that with some effort I still could make fit inside and it worked again.
I bought one which the electronics is on the base side. bit stupid engineering unless of course the outset was to design to fail. Sad sad world we live in... Thanks for the video.
I did like that board. The unit may suffer from water damage, but the board was nice. Lots of protections in there (self testing, flyback diode, filter caps), all components specs printed on the PCB, someone took that part of the engineering quite seriously.
Based on one of your concluding comments, I'd appreciate a reliable online resource where I could find out the build quality of typical electronic devices to see if the manufacturer has gone the extra mile and included coatings or other features to prolong the life of the device. It seems quite typical for kettles, toasters, fan heaters and other consumer electrical items to break down after ~ 1 year of use. Really bad for the environment and not so good for your pocket either.
Only type I’ve used is an espresso machine with a steam generator that feeds the milk frother with steam, no motor involved in the frothing. More expensive on the whole. I have a sous-vide circulator rated at 1200 watts, but once the water is up to temperature I’m hoping the circulation pump is what usually draws power and the heating element doesn’t run very much. Otherwise those 2 to 3 day cooking periods might get expensive!
Storing it after use upside down might help with liquid ingress down the shaft. I know it would cost more but why not use a sealed jug with magnets driving the whisking element?. 2x👍
There would need to be a whisk effect in order to incorporate air and froth the milk. I'm not sure those little pill shaped stirrer things I've seen chemists uss would work.
I have exactly the same, still working, but it tends to burn the milk a bit, so cleaning needs a brush systematically to avoid buildup of brown nasty residue, I suspect bad fluid dynamics design or bad temp ramps.
@@jpdemer5 in the office i have "swiss coffee brand one" which looks mechanically similar, but does not burn milk. There you just do a run with water&drop of fairy plus spash it once with fresh water: done for the day.
I suspect that the double-sided protection circuits are there because the same appliance also is present in the rest of Europe with the Schuko plugs that don't care about "live" and "neutral" and the result depends on which way you flip the plug that day.
If i remember correctly the LVD does not allow a fuse in both Live and neutral in equipment for the UK. As if a fuse blows there can't be any dangerous voltages in side. if the neutral fuse blows all parts of the circuit become live so would fail the directive. I expect as the only way the unit can be disassembled is to remove it from the base, all power is removed from the unit so a blown neutral fuse is not a hazard.
Fascinating! I love your ' one moment please' cuts! I'm trying to diagnose a full rectified 5v ~12v potentiometer controlled power supply. It controls rgb array LEDs , with motorized mirrors x 3. The power supply LED is flashing,. It's likei a loss of capacitance, but all capacitors look fine with or without a load , but adjusting the 'pot' just hastens the led indication. I dunno, but I have two of these lights with the same problem... given for free by my DJ friend! So I watch your vids alot . I know it's easy to buy a new supply, but that's hardly the point of getting $500 NZD worth of lighting for free.
Lol, water ingress and electrics certainly do not mix. I remember my dad got involved helping a water skier boost his outboard fuel injection systems back in the 80s. Had a ball doing it but was such a ball ache trying to seal everything from the salt water it was near impossible with materials and the low budget available. I learnt how to water ski for free though. Shame the North sea was so cold.
Thanks Clive, another good one. Why is R6 rated 56 Kilo Joules ? This board is meant for repair, the values are silkscreened onto board, it's a keeper !
Clive, any chance you could do a quick video on the 'parallel switching phenomenon'? I read a article about it but don't fully understand it. There doesn't seem to be anything about it on TH-cam.
"It'll work for a certain length of time and then you can buy a new one!" Excellent marketing strategy, especially if you can forbid anyone outside your company to mend it! ^cough^ Apple ^cough^
@zh84 - nah, with me it means I will look elsewhere first rather than immediately repeating my mistake of buying the same make/brand again (of course, there may be other reasons that I buy another item from that make/brand).
i fondly remember upgrading one of those hand wooshers from 3V 2xAAA batteries to a 9V mini trafo wallplug (adding an alibi resistor) because it was a bit bent and the user wanted it repaired... worked like a charm, but never heard how long the second life (b)lasted.. it was fine if you did not hold the button too long ;-) . i think i was around 14 years back then... (never found myself to need any fancy foam or high pressure stuff to enjoy a simple yummy coffee... all that fuss and cleaning and extra things to fail)
This reminds me my father's previous milk frother. It worked flawlessly until he "washed" it right before use, Ignoring "small sticker" (literally half of frothers height was taken by sticker which I purposely did not remove) saying to only hand wash milk compartment.
weird that they used the motor shaft to turn the frother, they could just put a magnet on it and on the frother and turn it with no shaft needing to go through the metal cup
Does that work through metal though? Those magnetic stirrers used in lab equipment go through glass. It's unclear what the base is made of. 3:28 Possibly plastic, maybe metal.
@@ianstobie Lab magnetic stirrers work fine through aluminum and stainless-steel, use them with pressure reactors all the time. Probably some extra drag due to eddy current losses and local heating, but not a substantial problem. Of course, if it was designed this way, then the milk wouldn't get into the electronics and you wouldn't need to buy a new one every year or two. Seems like a rather obvious case of designed obsolescence.
@@ianstobie they do if you have a metal thats not electrically conductive and non ferrous. I would even see it work with electrically conductive ones but it might not be perfectly efficient. And its not like ferrous metals block out 100% of the field.
I didn't know they made milk frothers with a rubber seal between the motor and container, I can't imagine that would work for long. The fancy Italian one my father has uses a much neater magnet system, though it does get a tad noise, since it has to cool it's electronics in operation.
I have one of these but the frother whisk is magnetically coupled and the milk container is completely sealed from the mechanism below. It works on the same principle as those laboratory magnetic stirrers. No chance of liquid ingress.
Maybe I got spoilt when working on avionics but every PCB got conformal coating. It shone under UV light and was easily soldered through or removed with IPA. I worked on electronics from a 747 that swam in the sea and then spent about 6 years in a shed before it arrived at my bench to see if could be recertified for flight. It still worked. Admittedly there was corrosion on connectors etc that needed dealing with first, but I'll reiterate, it still worked and passed all tests. Except the visual test. There's a story there in itself. I looked up the coating recently and even at retail prices, it would be about 20p per laptop board. It seems criminal that phones/laptops (and particularly items that contain liquids like this) aren't conformal coated. It's almost* as if the manufacturer hopes that it will last the warranty period and not too much longer 🤷🏻♀️ * Exactly
Which is why I think manufacturers, suppliers and retailers should be forced to have a mandatory insurance scheme that pays the customer the greater of either current price of a replacement item or the original price of the item if the original item or a replacement does not last a reasonable time. With an independent organisation deciding on what a reasonable time is for each type of appliance. Then you will find manufacturers actually design items to last much longer. Yes, items will cost a little more, but I don’t think the price will rise an unreasonable amount.
Hi Clive, how do I send in equipment for autopsy? I've got the guts of a pretty dire 4ft fluorescent fitting from a spraybooth. They were in banks of 3 behind glass panels. Well actually there are two fittings, one working and one that went bang. For those that did work, tube life was 12-24 months and lumen output wasn't great. The rest went in the bin and the whole lot were replaced with Osram ballasts and tubes. The adjacent booth had previously been "upgraded" to LED tubes but I worked out I would need 4 LED tubes in each bay to replace 3 fluorescents for the same light output, even with the best Philips units having good CRI. Not sure what LED tubes were used in the other booth, but it looks a bit poor compared to the fluorescents.
Excellent little video. Suggestions for a future one: Little Devil by Qiui - Friend sent it to me because they're the company that produced the remote control cha stity devices that got hacked a while back, and they're now producing an electroshock collar. Seems like something which could easily lead to harm if their discharge cap isn't appropriately sized (Cheap, too, like 50£ on eBay which makes me highly skeptical of the build quality.)
Need a few seconds of foreplay for the milky froth system to function as designed. Hopefully it's not clogged with milky goo. Rusty inside? Lack of routine use, need to cycle the old frothy milk out at least once a week. Fumbling around in the dark should still be acceptable.
The PCB has an arrow coming from the MCU and it says HT46R005 - it's a Holtek OTP Microcontroller. (taking the risk of posting this at 7 minutes in and not seeing if Clive knows that later in the video :P )
I've recently fixed two things from around the 80s and silk screen had a lot of useful info on it so have a habit of looking at the silk immediately lol
Perhaps an interesting device to involve in future alcohol/carbonating experiments ? If this entitles us to the same type of faciès we were generously offered the last time then by all means YES !
Yup, I bought half a dozen Osram 8.8 watt LED bulbs to try as replacements for CFL bulbs which fail normally within a year. The Osram devices started failing at week 2 or 3 with a 50% attrition rate at 2 or 3 months. Needless to say, I've put Osram at the bottom of the list. I'll probably look at buying the highest wattage Phillips LED bulbs, and dhuby them as per BC's current philosophy. We need 8 watt LED bulbs and if I get the highest power ones available and Dhuby them down to 8 watts they should last a long time. They do cost nearly twice as much however, and it will mean futzing around with over a dozen light bulbs to get what I want. On the good side, the flat panel "oyster" LED lights seem to be doing rather well. I have have a few here which have lasted several years with zero noticable degridation, and that includes a cheapo Chinese one that I used to replace the guts of a CFL T/5/10/something in my work room. It was too big to take the original cover so I 3D printed something in clear PLA. It's the brightest light in the house. So my current experience is - LED oyster lights (LEDs on an aluminium substrate in a ring about 200mm diameter) last three years minimum. Osram LED bulbs - three months. Regarding the Osram lights - they fail with a constant output of only a fraction of a watt, so it might just be the feedback circuit which has failed. I might look into it and if BC is interested I could send him a couple from OZ. It might be resistors failing rather than the LEDs.
Not planned obsolescence, just quest for lower cost. The first gen bulbs weights probably 5x as much as the newest ones because of the heavy metal body/heatsink, of course they cost 10x as much too. The reason? Look in the mirror.
Not sure if I can be a geek at 50 but I love electronics and I like you like to get to the bottom of why some thing does not work another great one ,on another note any thoughts on where the universe started ? what point in Space
To me it seems Clive went in a bit fast, meaning I fixed a water boiler with a similair base. Issue was the base no longer made contact with the kettle. So simply by bending the contact blades in the base socket made it get the 220 Volts again and worked fine.
With the difficulty of preventing water ingress, and the impracticality of potting *everything*, I wonder whether having a little package of silica gel in there would help? I guess it would just get overwhelmed after a while.
I've never understood these gadgets. Not only are they hard (if sometimes not impossible) to repair, they also cost almost as much as a basic espresso machine with a proper steam wand.
I think that Thomas' surname has to be pronunced not "Naghee" but N+A+D+J, a soft sound not in English the "GY", like wedge or george but in soft prononciation. It means Big in Hungarian and a quite common surname in Hungary.
Those tactile buttons don't last forever. Had a set of kitchen scales that had on/off/tare on the same button. Eventually got to the point you couldn't tare or turn off reliably. Easy fix for a few pence and a few minutes of soldering.
Pause momentarily...(otherwise, turn off the camera whilst I go caveman on this thing!) Aside from the alcohol experiments, which i have become a huge fan of, these "investigative" autopsies are very very interesting! If you're ever looking for a career change, the fire investigation field could use a person with your skill set! Again, thanks so much for sharing!
I'm sure 100k NTCs have been around forever, but with 3d printers being common now it certainly shouldn't be much of a problem getting a new one quickly, and yes they have super thin leads and it's annoying, probably to eliminate wire resistance for temperature accuracy
One thing worthy of note about the design of the PCB is that the motor and temperature sensor have identical connectors. You could easily come to grief if you get the connections swapped.
This was definitely a Holtek microcontroller. The big problem with ASICs is that they're application specific, so they need to be developed for each application. Microcontrollers are generic so there's no need to redesign the chip, and they've gotten so cheap the price is hard to beat.
Thanks, Clive - you've again satisfied my curiosity with a thorough examination of a kitchen appliance.
the better frothers use a magnet mounted to the motor with a magnetic whisk like the nespresso units, although they have some quality issues too. Just to note if you ever try to open a nespresso frother, they split in the middle and the base is ultrasonically welded. Don't find that out the hard way like me 🙃
That's the more expensive not "better"....But that said, it has less leakage problems through the bearing....
@@muppetpaster I have one from Severin, magnetically drive and induction heating. If only it didn't make noise...
My Bodum frother uses the magnetic coupling approach and it works really well. I also haven’t had it for very long and I don’t use it much so who knows how long it’ll actually last.
Begging your pardon, friend, but would you mind elaborating on ultrasonic welding, please? I can only find technical papers on the subject.
Vibrate two pieces of plastic with some somewhat specific geometry together sutch that they heat up, melt a little and stick together. It’s cheaper than fasteners, easy to mold and more secure than snaps
My friend has a milk frother similar to this, but I'm guessing a more recent model. The milk frothing spring thing is just held in the middle of the jug by a peg and it's rotated magnetically, without a direct connection to the motor beneath. There is no shaft going through the base of the milk "compartment", so it should never leak like this did.
My mother got one of these exact frothers, it died within a couple of weeks. I wish I could have seen inside it but she just returned it back to amazon and got a free replacement which has been working fine for the better part of a year now. I guess now is my chance to see what's inside! Thanks for the content man!
Gotmine for 10yrs or there about....working 6-10 times a day,no problemo...
We got a Swan brand deep fat fryer.It died in about 10 seconds - on a 'dry run'. Yes, thankfully I'd ignored the instructions to not put it on without oil in it, thankfully, so it wasn't all sticky.
Took the bottom off it and found a 5mm long lenticular plastic pin that linked two metal linkages apart in the thermostat. The two metal pieces having a hole in them for the ends of the plastic pin. So rough transit must have taken place as the pin had bounced out of one of these locating holes and was therefore effectively longer than it should have been. Once back correctly in the hole and put back together, it worked fine for a number of years.
Deep fat fryers became popular in the 1980s due to the number of chip pan fires burning houses down. We had a chip pan - used twice a week and not one fire. So it was somehat ironic that the deep fat fryer, when it failed a few years later due to a bad electrical contact, the connection overheated, melted the base plastic and fell through onto the worktop making two burn marks ! Since then, it's been oven chips !
Story 2
Back in the day - late 1970s (age ~13-14) after school, I'd go with a school friend to his house. As his dad worked shifts, he'd be home to make meals for his kids. One day while I was there we smelt smoke - his dad had gone out and left the chip pan on and when we went into the kitchen the top of the pan was all flame. I just put the lid on and moved it to a cold electric hob ring. We then went back into the living room - when my friend's sister came in and said "What's that smell?" We explained - and went back into the kitchen - I took the pan lid off again and the pan once again burst into flames - so she could see what we had !
Very helpful! My Lidl frother quit heating after only one use. My bf knew you had a video of one, so we dismantled it and were very inspired by your detailed explanations. The problem was with the heating element fuse.
It is amazing how pronounciation improves when putting a lamp in the mouth, Clive
Queen's English! Wot!
I thought it was torcher.
@@millomweb very good 😊
Hoo Noo Broon Coo?
A variation of the plummy accent.
I always appreciate your autopsys. I found anything in a moist environment must be waterproofed before use.
I had a Chamberlain P.I. driveway alert which started going off with nothing in range.
I opened the transmitter to find water had condensed inside the “water resistance” box.
I dried it then used clear enamel to waterproof the board and petroleum jelly to protect the battery connections.
It has been working great for 9+ years so far.
The board has HT46R005 silk screened on which immediately returned a result for a "Holtek Small Package 8-bit OTP MCU". It has a fairly extensive looking datasheet for what it can do. the ToC is 4-5 pages alone.
"The HT46R005 HT48R005 are a series of 8-bit high-performance, RISC architecture microcontrollers specifically designed for a wide range of applications."
It looks pretty capable.
One day I'll remember to check the silkscreen. I tend to go straight for the components themselves.
Sadly not capable of handling water ingress 😞
@@chrisa2735-h3z Now you're just milking it.
These small Holtek micros are basically Microchip PIC16 (i.e. 14 bit core) clones. Same instruction set (but different assembler mnemonics), same pipeline architecture giving one clock per cycle at one quarter of the clock rate, same memory map etc. They are very cheap though, single digit cents cheap.
@@thomasbonse yeah, cos it's not meant for water ;)
It says HT46R005 right on the PCB, which is a 8-bit OTP MCU.
Looks like the motor is well and truly buggered judging by corrosion and how slowly it turns. Can't see it whipping up much froth.
It's free running. It doesn't have to turn that fast.
@@bigclivedotcom Plus it has got the spring to help it froth
It probably looked slower than it is due to camera frame rate.
I have a similar one and the motor ist way quicker. Might really be a Video compression issue or the motor ist broken.
@@bigclivedotcom hey Clive I have a aircraft led corn cob style warning light meant for a tower that I used as a driveway light for 8 or so years that has finally died. Do you have a P.O. Box I’ll send it to you
mm got to love those crusties from moisture fun. reminds me of one of my auto soap dispensers. water and soap got in and corroded some spots and the sort one of the battery terminals was snapped off. so i cleaned it up then super heated soldered into the broken tab and let it melt down and fuse into the plastic and metal as a new contact point added 2 part epoxy to all of the wires and switch parts. been a year so far so good. i checked other one i owned lucky its fine so i reinforced it as well for good measure.
If there's a shaft coming in from the bottom, leaking is just inevitable. Had a few machines that do this and they all leaked eventually and ruin the bearings, thus end of life since you can't rebuild them.
Yes, it seems like the rotating pair of magnets would be a better design for things like this that do not need significant torque.
I just love these teardowns, reverse engineering with diagrams and all round reviews of ordinary household electronics and their internals.
Thanks so much for sharing. 😎👌🏼
I've had a lot of these! The ones from Amazon last about six months and get replaced under warrantee. They all stop heating. The Lidl version lasted a good bit longer and has a much longer guarantee. Both have identical bases so I guess are from the same factory.
That's exactly like one i purchased on Amazon. Made in China, and rebranded for various vendors, apparently. The heating element went out on mine, but it still froths cold. i'm giving it away tomorrow, since i purchased an upgrade.
By the way, the button is designed to give a hot foam option (or just heated with the other stirrer) with a quick button press, or a cold foam option with a 2 second press.
In the name of science, this needs cranking up on Andy’s big boys power supply, until it pops
This.
I enjoy Thomas Nagy's videos, although he has generated less content recently. Perhaps it is the lack of frothed milk that has been the issue. (My kettle failed recently... very sad to see it has a non-replaceable element... no option apart from land fill... disposable things seem to be the way of the world... poor planet)
why are people on youtube always talking about "landfills" ?
Whats up with getting it to recycling instead in other countries ?
There are no landfillings allowed since 2004 around here, only completely inert materials (rubbel) and before that it was already highly regulated.
"Excuse me, I've just got a torch in my mouse..."
Not a sentence I thought I'd ever had heard uttered on this channel...
The automatic captions actually make a valiant effort when he puts the torch in his mouth, buh hen ih wah jus hoo huch.
Had a similar issues with a morphy richards unit, Horrible corrosion inside which i assume came in through the motor base seal. The tiny tactile switch was smaller then anything I had in stock so I did a search and found a box of 250 assorted tactile switches costing $10.00AU from a vendor on Ebay. The unit I looked at had the NTC thermistor glued into a receptacle which was welded into the bottom of the jug. The Kettle ( part of a set I was told ) had five different temperatures which were accessible through five push button ( tactile ) switches on the base unit. When I checked the kettle, It used the same MCU as the milk jug so I guess morphy richards simply program the MCU for whichever product it is installed in...
My Lavazza milk frother uses the sealed removable jug/magnet method, so liquid can't leak into the base. It's very effective, but you need to use full fat milk for a decent froth!
It looks like it would be a pretty good quality unit if they would waterproof the board. Like potting it then using wires to the pushbutton rather than board mounted.
The transformer is useful. Interesting circuit design.
EDIT: Clive, I just listened to your chat with Simple. It was brilliant.
Why don't you come round our house and help yourself ? I've just thrown a dynamo in the bin. Nowadays, the space is more valuable than the junk :(
Clive, you're welcome to one of of our starterless fluorescent lights !
I saw only one time good froth cup, that had no direct contact between that whipper and motor, instead it have magnets on both sides that rotate on some teflon-like surface. Only problem was that rotating bits inside cup had really crappy mount for that whipper so after some time it start wobbling and at the end it broke. But beside that, thanks to no holes inside there where no corrosion at all.
Apart from trivial cosmetic differences it appears identical to the units ALDI Australia sells as companions to their coffee pod machines.
Our unit at work appeared to suffer from similar problems with water ingress and corrosion but my inspection wasn't as thorough due to running out of patience at the spudger stage and completing disassembly with a railway point clip. No serviceable parts were found after that...
Excellent teardown, now I know what’s inside this! I have this device, I believe that it does go through several heat cycles, at least 2-3. Maybe there is a minimum time threshold between the heater turning off and back on? No idea.
Converted one to a solder melting pot... seemed like a good idea at the time, did it's job but was very scary to use.
I had two units of a more or less similar design (Silver Crest) from Lidl. Both died within the 3 years warranty period of milk ingress into the motor (via the shaft). Got my money back in both instances. 😃
Pushing the button for 3 seconds wil start stirring the milk without heating.
If I could find fitting motors I could easily revive them... the ingress issue might be addressed by a thin disc on the shaft, spinning any leakage out of harms way.
Clive, the MCU reference seems to be written on the board in huge letters 😉: ht46r005
I googled it and apparently the manufacture is Holtek Semiconductor which I never heard of before.
Edit: in the datasheet of ht46r005
they show a 10 pin package however...🤷♂️
By the way, Clive missed the part number of the MCU. It's a Holtek HT46R003. He didn't even need to read the package, it was on the silkscreen (having a camera recording makes us miss these sorts of things haha).
Thanks for the autopsy intreresting to see another brand, I have a different but functionally very similar milk heater/frother that quickly died. It was the last available so I could get a refund but not a new one. It was hard to dismantle but it turned out to be the small transformer 240 pri / 9V-0-9V sec that had died, the primairy windings cut somewhere. I only managed to find a slightly larger transformer that with some effort I still could make fit inside and it worked again.
Love the autopsy videos.... Learn so much from diagnosing the issues..
I bought one which the electronics is on the base side. bit stupid engineering unless of course the outset was to design to fail.
Sad sad world we live in...
Thanks for the video.
Humanity came far looking at this mind blowing device !! ;-)
I did like that board. The unit may suffer from water damage, but the board was nice. Lots of protections in there (self testing, flyback diode, filter caps), all components specs printed on the PCB, someone took that part of the engineering quite seriously.
It does seem well thought out.
I wonder if an older revision of the appliance had more waterproofing.
Based on one of your concluding comments, I'd appreciate a reliable online resource where I could find out the build quality of typical electronic devices to see if the manufacturer has gone the extra mile and included coatings or other features to prolong the life of the device. It seems quite typical for kettles, toasters, fan heaters and other consumer electrical items to break down after ~ 1 year of use. Really bad for the environment and not so good for your pocket either.
Only type I’ve used is an espresso machine with a steam generator that feeds the milk frother with steam, no motor involved in the frothing. More expensive on the whole.
I have a sous-vide circulator rated at 1200 watts, but once the water is up to temperature I’m hoping the circulation pump is what usually draws power and the heating element doesn’t run very much. Otherwise those 2 to 3 day cooking periods might get expensive!
Storing it after use upside down might help with liquid ingress down the shaft. I know it would cost more but why not use a sealed jug with magnets driving the whisking element?. 2x👍
The Nespresso one uses the magnetic drive. Works well.
Magnetic stirrers are very familiar in chemical laboratories.
@@zh84 Yes, I never thought of that. 👍
@@PIXscotland Handy to know.👍
There would need to be a whisk effect in order to incorporate air and froth the milk. I'm not sure those little pill shaped stirrer things I've seen chemists uss would work.
I have exactly the same, still working, but it tends to burn the milk a bit, so cleaning needs a brush systematically to avoid buildup of brown nasty residue, I suspect bad fluid dynamics design or bad temp ramps.
Cleaning the heating element must be nearly impossible. I'm amazed that it looked so good in this well-used unit.
@@jpdemer5 in the office i have "swiss coffee brand one" which looks mechanically similar, but does not burn milk. There you just do a run with water&drop of fairy plus spash it once with fresh water: done for the day.
I suspect that the double-sided protection circuits are there because the same appliance also is present in the rest of Europe with the Schuko plugs that don't care about "live" and "neutral" and the result depends on which way you flip the plug that day.
If i remember correctly the LVD does not allow a fuse in both Live and neutral in equipment for the UK. As if a fuse blows there can't be any dangerous voltages in side. if the neutral fuse blows all parts of the circuit become live so would fail the directive. I expect as the only way the unit can be disassembled is to remove it from the base, all power is removed from the unit so a blown neutral fuse is not a hazard.
The thermal fuse is different. It's to allow for a heater ground fault and swapped polarity.
Fascinating! I love your ' one moment please' cuts! I'm trying to diagnose a full rectified 5v ~12v potentiometer controlled power supply. It controls rgb array LEDs , with motorized mirrors x 3. The power supply LED is flashing,. It's likei a loss of capacitance, but all capacitors look fine with or without a load , but adjusting the 'pot' just hastens the led indication. I dunno, but I have two of these lights with the same problem... given for free by my DJ friend! So I watch your vids alot . I know it's easy to buy a new supply, but that's hardly the point of getting $500 NZD worth of lighting for free.
Lol, water ingress and electrics certainly do not mix. I remember my dad got involved helping a water skier boost his outboard fuel injection systems back in the 80s. Had a ball doing it but was such a ball ache trying to seal everything from the salt water it was near impossible with materials and the low budget available. I learnt how to water ski for free though. Shame the North sea was so cold.
on the board the microcontroller is marked ht45r005
First we had distilled buckfast...
Then we had carbonated buckfast...
Can we see if it'll froth?
I love that perfect description "gangy" lol Great vid Clive!
Thank you Big Clive. I have really enjoyed your videos. I find your clever ways very interesting. You make my day. Be well my friend, and spudge on.
I have similar thing but it has magnetic stirer. It was cheap as hell like 12euro
Thanks Clive, another good one.
Why is R6 rated 56 Kilo Joules ? This board is meant for repair, the values are silkscreened onto board, it's a keeper !
@@SeanBZA yep, thought it was, but a random "Joules", sounds mote 'tech-ee'. ;)
Clive, any chance you could do a quick video on the 'parallel switching phenomenon'? I read a article about it but don't fully understand it. There doesn't seem to be anything about it on TH-cam.
I've never really looked into that.
I think you'll find that the MCU (U2) is a Holtek HT46R005 ... there's an arrow pointing to the part number on the legend layer ;-)
1:54 Clive pauses while he _gets it off._ *Waaaaaay* TMI there Clive. 😱
Excellent video. What is that variable resistor test thing that you are using? It looks really useful.
I was going to ask the same.
It's very old. I'm not sure they are available now.
"It'll work for a certain length of time and then you can buy a new one!" Excellent marketing strategy, especially if you can forbid anyone outside your company to mend it! ^cough^ Apple ^cough^
@@mgancarzjr Schematics and parts in the case of Apple.
Simply, just don't buy Apple. There are other brands that equal or better them. Take some time and a little research, you'll be glad you did.
Samsung. Appliance companies. Most companies that deal with electronics
my lord, is that....legal?
@zh84 - nah, with me it means I will look elsewhere first rather than immediately repeating my mistake of buying the same make/brand again (of course, there may be other reasons that I buy another item from that make/brand).
i fondly remember upgrading one of those hand wooshers from 3V 2xAAA batteries to a 9V mini trafo wallplug (adding an alibi resistor) because it was a bit bent and the user wanted it repaired... worked like a charm, but never heard how long the second life (b)lasted.. it was fine if you did not hold the button too long ;-) . i think i was around 14 years back then...
(never found myself to need any fancy foam or high pressure stuff to enjoy a simple yummy coffee... all that fuss and cleaning and extra things to fail)
This reminds me my father's previous milk frother. It worked flawlessly until he "washed" it right before use, Ignoring "small sticker" (literally half of frothers height was taken by sticker which I purposely did not remove) saying to only hand wash milk compartment.
I once had a waterproof coat - until Mum washed it !
weird that they used the motor shaft to turn the frother, they could just put a magnet on it and on the frother and turn it with no shaft needing to go through the metal cup
Yup, Nespresso sells a similar device with exactly that feature
Kids and swollowee things.
Does that work through metal though? Those magnetic stirrers used in lab equipment go through glass. It's unclear what the base is made of. 3:28 Possibly plastic, maybe metal.
@@ianstobie Lab magnetic stirrers work fine through aluminum and stainless-steel, use them with pressure reactors all the time. Probably some extra drag due to eddy current losses and local heating, but not a substantial problem. Of course, if it was designed this way, then the milk wouldn't get into the electronics and you wouldn't need to buy a new one every year or two. Seems like a rather obvious case of designed obsolescence.
@@ianstobie they do if you have a metal thats not electrically conductive and non ferrous.
I would even see it work with electrically conductive ones but it might not be perfectly efficient. And its not like ferrous metals block out 100% of the field.
I didn't know they made milk frothers with a rubber seal between the motor and container, I can't imagine that would work for long. The fancy Italian one my father has uses a much neater magnet system, though it does get a tad noise, since it has to cool it's electronics in operation.
That was why more complicated inside then i thought it would have been.. COOL VIDEO!! : )
The microcontroller silkscreen suggests it is a Holtek ht45r05 - > datasheetspdf.com/pdf/170537/HoltekSemiconductorInc/HT48R05A-1/1
I have one of these but the frother whisk is magnetically coupled and the milk container is completely sealed from the mechanism below. It works on the same principle as those laboratory magnetic stirrers. No chance of liquid ingress.
Maybe I got spoilt when working on avionics but every PCB got conformal coating. It shone under UV light and was easily soldered through or removed with IPA. I worked on electronics from a 747 that swam in the sea and then spent about 6 years in a shed before it arrived at my bench to see if could be recertified for flight. It still worked. Admittedly there was corrosion on connectors etc that needed dealing with first, but I'll reiterate, it still worked and passed all tests. Except the visual test. There's a story there in itself.
I looked up the coating recently and even at retail prices, it would be about 20p per laptop board. It seems criminal that phones/laptops (and particularly items that contain liquids like this) aren't conformal coated. It's almost* as if the manufacturer hopes that it will last the warranty period and not too much longer 🤷🏻♀️
* Exactly
Which is why I think manufacturers, suppliers and retailers should be forced to have a mandatory insurance scheme that pays the customer the greater of either current price of a replacement item or the original price of the item if the original item or a replacement does not last a reasonable time. With an independent organisation deciding on what a reasonable time is for each type of appliance. Then you will find manufacturers actually design items to last much longer. Yes, items will cost a little more, but I don’t think the price will rise an unreasonable amount.
Good Thursday morning to you sir from Wellington Somerset
“The screws are spinning…”. Well, the world would be different otherwise!
Hi Clive, how do I send in equipment for autopsy?
I've got the guts of a pretty dire 4ft fluorescent fitting from a spraybooth. They were in banks of 3 behind glass panels.
Well actually there are two fittings, one working and one that went bang.
For those that did work, tube life was 12-24 months and lumen output wasn't great.
The rest went in the bin and the whole lot were replaced with Osram ballasts and tubes.
The adjacent booth had previously been "upgraded" to LED tubes but I worked out I would need 4 LED tubes in each bay to replace 3 fluorescents for the same light output, even with the best Philips units having good CRI.
Not sure what LED tubes were used in the other booth, but it looks a bit poor compared to the fluorescents.
Some of the early LED tubes were rubbish and also degraded fast.
Is the intention for Thomas to rebuild it? Otherwise, now usable for those who wish to have black coffee.
Excellent little video. Suggestions for a future one: Little Devil by Qiui - Friend sent it to me because they're the company that produced the remote control cha stity devices that got hacked a while back, and they're now producing an electroshock collar. Seems like something which could easily lead to harm if their discharge cap isn't appropriately sized (Cheap, too, like 50£ on eBay which makes me highly skeptical of the build quality.)
"I'm fumbling around in the dark here"
It happens to all of us when things are screwy.
Now I want one thanks Clive
"Surely, Clive won't butcher Nagy"
>nagee
Welp.
Excellent video fella thank you 🙏 I
Hi Clive. I'm guessing that you'd tested that there was voltage at the base connector before pulling the frother apart?
Yes I did.
06:40 - Isn't it HT46R006 MCU?
Need a few seconds of foreplay for the milky froth system to function as designed. Hopefully it's not clogged with milky goo. Rusty inside? Lack of routine use, need to cycle the old frothy milk out at least once a week. Fumbling around in the dark should still be acceptable.
The PCB has an arrow coming from the MCU and it says HT46R005 - it's a Holtek OTP Microcontroller.
(taking the risk of posting this at 7 minutes in and not seeing if Clive knows that later in the video :P )
I miss PCB text a lot. I'm concentrating too much on the components.
I've recently fixed two things from around the 80s and silk screen had a lot of useful info on it so have a habit of looking at the silk immediately lol
Perhaps an interesting device to involve in future alcohol/carbonating experiments ? If this entitles us to the same type of faciès we were generously offered the last time then by all means YES !
"... more as a sensation than anything else ... " said the master!
Gotta love planned obsolescence
*Cough*LED light bulbs*cough*
Yup, I bought half a dozen Osram 8.8 watt LED bulbs to try as replacements for CFL bulbs which fail normally within a year. The Osram devices started failing at week 2 or 3 with a 50% attrition rate at 2 or 3 months. Needless to say, I've put Osram at the bottom of the list. I'll probably look at buying the highest wattage Phillips LED bulbs, and dhuby them as per BC's current philosophy. We need 8 watt LED bulbs and if I get the highest power ones available and Dhuby them down to 8 watts they should last a long time. They do cost nearly twice as much however, and it will mean futzing around with over a dozen light bulbs to get what I want.
On the good side, the flat panel "oyster" LED lights seem to be doing rather well. I have have a few here which have lasted several years with zero noticable degridation, and that includes a cheapo Chinese one that I used to replace the guts of a CFL T/5/10/something in my work room. It was too big to take the original cover so I 3D printed something in clear PLA. It's the brightest light in the house. So my current experience is - LED oyster lights (LEDs on an aluminium substrate in a ring about 200mm diameter) last three years minimum. Osram LED bulbs - three months.
Regarding the Osram lights - they fail with a constant output of only a fraction of a watt, so it might just be the feedback circuit which has failed. I might look into it and if BC is interested I could send him a couple from OZ. It might be resistors failing rather than the LEDs.
Not planned obsolescence, just quest for lower cost. The first gen bulbs weights probably 5x as much as the newest ones because of the heavy metal body/heatsink, of course they cost 10x as much too. The reason? Look in the mirror.
A wonderfully frothy video!
Not sure if I can be a geek at 50 but I love electronics and I like you like to get to the bottom of why some thing does not work another great one ,on another note any thoughts on where the universe started ? what point in
Space
If the universe is infinite then any point can be considered central. But no point is really central.
You just made the Nagy sound like an M&S advert...
Not just any milk frother...
To me it seems Clive went in a bit fast, meaning I fixed a water boiler with a similair base. Issue was the base no longer made contact with the kettle. So simply by bending the contact blades in the base socket made it get the 220 Volts again and worked fine.
I did check that.
*Trips over extension cord*... Here!
With the difficulty of preventing water ingress, and the impracticality of potting *everything*, I wonder whether having a little package of silica gel in there would help? I guess it would just get overwhelmed after a while.
Drain holes are good, although they also allow the water in during washing.
I've never understood these gadgets. Not only are they hard (if sometimes not impossible) to repair, they also cost almost as much as a basic espresso machine with a proper steam wand.
The water ingress in ours was due to somebody helpfully soaking it in the sink. A bit of TLC and it's working again.
I think that Thomas' surname has to be pronunced not "Naghee" but N+A+D+J, a soft sound not in English the "GY", like wedge or george but in soft prononciation. It means Big in Hungarian and a quite common surname in Hungary.
Is there a food-safe conformal coating?
Uhhhh... gelatin?
Those tactile buttons don't last forever. Had a set of kitchen scales that had on/off/tare on the same button. Eventually got to the point you couldn't tare or turn off reliably. Easy fix for a few pence and a few minutes of soldering.
You mean a 'milk stirrer' surely its gotta go faster than that ! nice fix.....cheers.
Thanks Clive, I like your videos and the way you reverse engineering!
This Thomas... He's Hungarian? I'm also Nagy 😁
I think someone didn't read the manual.Top of the first page probably says something like "Do not immerse in water to clean".
93% of any repair job is just figuring out how to get inside without causing any further damage.
I appreciate the ladder diagram because I do understand that. ⚡️🏴⚡️🇺🇸
Pause momentarily...(otherwise, turn off the camera whilst I go caveman on this thing!) Aside from the alcohol experiments, which i have become a huge fan of, these "investigative" autopsies are very very interesting! If you're ever looking for a career change, the fire investigation field could use a person with your skill set! Again, thanks so much for sharing!
That looks very similar to one I purchased from Aldi about 7 years ago
I'm sure 100k NTCs have been around forever, but with 3d printers being common now it certainly shouldn't be much of a problem getting a new one quickly, and yes they have super thin leads and it's annoying, probably to eliminate wire resistance for temperature accuracy
Smaller wires = smaller thermal mass = quicker to react. You don't want the wires themselves acting like a heatsink.
@@EricStuyvesant yeah that too :D
@@Tarex_ - also thinner wires have more resistance not less. But the current flow is so low that this is irrelevant.
@@Mark1024MAK right, was thinking less copper mass, just as in that the copper doesn't mess up the readings since they are resistance dependent
One thing worthy of note about the design of the PCB is that the motor and temperature sensor have identical connectors. You could easily come to grief if you get the connections swapped.
It wouldn't cause any problems if that was done, other than possibly flagging up a temperature sensor error.
If you hold the button in it wil start spinning but not switching the relais, and i timer shuts it off after 30 sec or so
I know you called it a micro, but it I were designing it, I would use a mini ASIC. Same outcome, but maybe cheaper?
This was definitely a Holtek microcontroller. The big problem with ASICs is that they're application specific, so they need to be developed for each application. Microcontrollers are generic so there's no need to redesign the chip, and they've gotten so cheap the price is hard to beat.
You can get a microcontroller for a few cents these days. That also lets you update the software if issues get detected in older products.
I had an aldi one like that many years ago