Fisher Price re-released their Music Box Record Player

Friday, December 10th, 2021

In 2010 Fisher Price re-released their Music Box Record Player, in a new version that does not work like the original:

So, starting in 2010 Fisher Price re-released their Music Box Record Player, in a classic-toy version that doesn’t work like the original. I got one, so I’m gonna take it apart pic.twitter.com/DytUrgzlCj

— foone (@Foone) October 29, 2021

The original one was made from 1971-1983, and didn’t require batteries.
You wound up the knob, and a releasing spring would drive the record under the head. pic.twitter.com/uoaI4tSq5C

— foone (@Foone) October 29, 2021

the original discs were a bunch of concentric circles with little indents on them. I’m not 100% sure but I think this basically worked like a standard music box, just with a disc instead of a cylinder pic.twitter.com/Ny764HvCks

— foone (@Foone) October 29, 2021

The first hint it’s 1000% different is the instructions which tell you to put batteries in it.
The original toy did not take batteries: it didn’t need them. pic.twitter.com/bDS18NwNLI

— foone (@Foone) October 29, 2021

So the original had a knob you used to wind the spring, right? But this one shouldn’t need that, it has batteries, so it must be electronic!

Well… Kinda. pic.twitter.com/W4WVEn6Fcb

— foone (@Foone) October 29, 2021

it turns out that knob is still used to wind a spring, which makes the disc spin.
And the spring has to be wound for the music to play, so here it is: pic.twitter.com/YijjUsihiJ

— foone (@Foone) October 29, 2021

So I went and got some duct tape and taped down the disc. It cannot spin at all. I tested by cranking up the spring and yep, no disc spinnage happens. Obviously if the disc can’t spin, there should be no music! pic.twitter.com/70GMObIvJT

— foone (@Foone) October 29, 2021

So first of all, the only smarts in this thing is this one blobbed chip.
This PC is labeled 1697-04, 2020.5.26 Rev:00
This presumably handles detecting which song to play, when to play it, and generates all the audio off some internal ROM pic.twitter.com/wDIpceyk6F

— foone (@Foone) October 30, 2021

This thing is connected to two “is it spinning?” sensors.
First, there’s 3 blobs on the wind-up knob, so the CPU can tell when you’re cranking it up. So it knows to wake up and start playing when that happens.
But how does it know when to stop? pic.twitter.com/jbc32390q0

— foone (@Foone) October 30, 2021

ok so they need a spring that can be wound up, and it can’t go too fast. They’ll need some kind of speed limiter on that, and unlike the ones used in things like toaster ovens, it needs to be relatively silent, and not make a ticking noise.

— foone (@Foone) October 30, 2021

SURPRISE! IT’S A FUCKING MUSIC BOX pic.twitter.com/mIqhLXOJ5V

— foone (@Foone) October 30, 2021

(Hat tip to commenter Chedolf.)

Posted in Business, Technology | 1 Comment »

Comments

Gavin Longmuir says:

December 10, 2021 at 10:06 am

“SURPRISE! IT’S A ####### MUSIC BOX”

Whenever I see something like that, I recall Tolkien’s comment about Orcs in the Lord of the Rings — their degenerate language, lacking any power or originality.

But then, this did come from Twitter — the epicenter of the lack of power or originality in language. Why does anyone bother with Twitter?

Russell: New article about Thorp https://archive.ph/fq5JC
Phileas Frogg: The class divide in the US is as deep and wide as any as has existed in history, but instead of acknowledging the divide, much less trying to bridge it, we have chosen moralization and mutual animosity, which will be the death of us.
Freddo: https://www.zerohedge.co m/geopolitical/us-drones -are-expensive-and-error -prone-so-ukraine-turns- china
Jim: The principle applies whatever the source of the wall-penetrating radio waves in question.
Phileas Frogg: In conjunction with the Rob Henderson excerpt one can safely conclude that neither drug use, nor sexual immorality, can be meaningfully correlated with class. “But poverty causes crime!” Does it?
Bruce: Green energy is a patronage fraud, and Terraform Industries is working with it. But their tech isn’t a fraud.
Handle: What is Henderson taking about? I was under the impression that it was a broadly believed meme and one frequently portrayed in popular entertainment for several generations before Henderson was born that college kids got drunk and enjoyed / experimented with recreational drugs quite a lot. Maybe Rob’s poorer friends couldn’t afford to watch those episodes of South Park or didn’t hear about George W Bush’s “youthful indiscretions”? Man, the left really is...
Bob Sykes: How effing stupid are we supposed to be. The energy input to make the methane will be several times the energy of combustion when the methane is burned. And, of course, all the methane will become exactly the amount of carbon dioxide originally removed from the atmosphere. Net, no carbon dioxide removal. And considering all the carbon produced during the manufacture of the Terraform system and the solar/wind systems, this proposal actually increases atmospheric CO2. And the cost claims are...
Gaikokumaniakku: If it’s “synthetic,” they could just call it “synthetic methane,” right? Calling it “synthetic natural gas” makes my brain hurt because I like to think that natural things are not synthetic. I love methane tech because I was raised on Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Typically I like to see it as a way of dealing with dung from agriculture, but I am a fan of methane tech regardless of how they make it.
Bruce: Very glad to see @TerraformIndies here. This could be really big. For example, why not put a Terrform Indies converter on every nuclear power plant in front of those electric heaters in the cooling towers? Closer to where people need natural gas than oil wells where they just burn the natural gas off because it’s not worth transport costs. And if CO2 is bad, like the climate change people say, it’s great to have a way to turn CO2 to something useful. And worse case, it’s a...
Namur: Well, it’s all about EROI (Energy Returned on Invested). Can this machine produce more energy in the form of natural gas than it consumes in the first place? Also, the energy to build and operate it also counts. Now, let’s say that it works: we are still far away for something like it that works for Diesel, the holy grail of our energy society.
Wawa: Misery causes drug abuse, whether rich or poor. Junkies and drunks are just self medicating in a self destructive way. When thousands of American soldiers, who were hooked on heroin, returned from Vietman the vast majority quickly kicked the habit. With the reason for their misery gone they stopped using. I noticed this first hand, when a buddy moved in with his girlfriend. Before she moved in he was a social drinker, after a few months with her he was an alcoholic. When she moved out he fully...
Bob Sykes: While the focus in Ukraine has been on the land war, and how drones have changed it, navies seem to be especially vulnerable. The Russian navy can’t seem to cope with them. I bet the US Navy will also be unable to cope. At 70 ton, $5M tank is easy prey to a cheap, small drone. US/NATO navies are unable to suppress Houthi drones and open the Red Sea. Are aircraft carriers viable? Some think that they would have been eliminated by the Soviet navy and air force in the 70′s.
Freddo: The armies of Ukraine and Russia are showing what can be done if it needs to be ready tomorrow and everything is expandable. Boeing is showing what happens when the procurement channel is filled with DEI hires.
Jim: Fun! https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=bIVzK-h6qao
McChuck: Laser designators also use a coded pulse system. That avoids spoofing and also enables multiple projectiles to be inbound to separate targets simultaneously.
Lucklucky: Yes, one aircraft where that is clear is the Tornado. Under its chin it has the Laser Range Finder and Marked Target Seekers (LRMTS), a laser ranging device to help calculate distances, speed, etc. for the ballistic computer and navigation. If it wants to designate targets for laser guided weapons it needs an external pod like TIALD or LITENING put into a pylon.
Isegoria: The Black Cat Squadron Wikipedia entry explains: During the squadron’s 14 years of existence, five U-2s were shot down by PRC air defenses (using S-75 Dvina missiles), with three pilots killed and two captured. Another pilot was killed while performing an operational mission off the Chinese coast, while seven U-2s were lost during training missions, killing six pilots.
Natureboi: It sounds like both pilots survived. This is not what “deadliest” means. Since Annie doesn’t even know what words mean, we should assume the rest of her story is also bullshit.
Albion: The number of politicians without children is another troubling aspect of our modern world, yet they eagerly rush to make judgement on those who do as well as utterly failing to understand how the young, developing mind works. Not a great recipe for our future.

Isegoria

Fisher Price re-released their Music Box Record Player

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