There are medical defibrillators: the modern ones have capacitors that don't make that high pitch, so some manufacturers have had to add sound chips, just because it's expected to make that noise to 'prove' that it's working.
It's not actually the capacitor bank that makes the whining, it's the HV charge circuit. Modern ones still whine, it's just above the range of human hearing.
Just like many modern cars has a speaker making the sound for the turn indicator, where in older cars it's the actual indicator relay that makes the click-clack.
Those are called skeuomorphs (mentioned in this video: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-xn7ZaT3AgoU.html), they're the inclusion of features from old things in their successors. Such as the camera-shutter sound when taking a picture with a smartphone, the icon for calling being an old landline phone or the icon for email being an envelope. All skeuomorphs, purely to make the new things more familiar to people used to the older versions of these things.
“Why not just buy a new one?” *”Well, I like this one.”* I can’t agree more with this attitude. Making everything disposable has broken any concept of sentimental value of things to so many people.
I was asked the same thing when I had to borrow a screwdriver to open up my old TI-83, which had stopped powering on even with a fresh battery. Sure I can do most of my calculations on my computer/phone and I probably could find a used replacement for not that much but I like *my* calculator and frankly sometimes the inputs with real buttons are nicer than digital stuff. Turned out the only problem was that the metal arms connecting the battery to the board are just sort of pushed against some contacts and at some point a drop must have bent them just enough that they weren’t quite touching anymore. Used pliers and had it working perfectly again
01:02 - Most likely, the same case is also used for an actual solar-powered calculator. It's cheaper to just cover up the solar panel in the non solar-powered models than to make individual cases for each. You can also see that there are recesses for two button batteries, even though the specific model uses a single battery that is mounted directly to the circuit board. One case molding, different calculator models.
Exactly. Those calculators are as cheap as they are because the entire process -from market research to design to production to distribution- was done so as efficiently as possible. Money was saved every step of the way, and manufacturing is usually the most expensive part.
I think you read too much into this. The manufacturer just stole the design from others and made minimal changes to it. By the way, the silver calculators are precisely the ones with fake solar cells, so just don't buy silver ones.
You do know that "solar light" is basically the same os normal light, irhgt? Just with more frequencies in it's spectrum. If you have a solar cell that works with visibile light, you don't need to point it at the sun for it to work, a light bulb will do.
When i was at Middle School, my mom gave me a Casio calculator that she used at high school. The device included a flip cover and had two way power. The only thing is that it had a dead battery, so I had to sit near the windows everytime I had a math exam. Similarly, I had a time limit to accomplish my math homework before nightfall or else my calculator wouldn’t turn on until the sun arises again. Fortunately, years later I found a way to replace the dead battery and it was a nice feeling to be finally using my calculator at night for the first time.
Hey, I think I have that same one! I know it's Casio. Is it the kind where you need to hold the flip cover open or it returns closed under spring tension?
@@slashplane Teaching kids how to use scientific calculators while they don't even know how to change the battery. Perfectly describes our education system.
I still use my gas powered calculator. Just changed the oil on it last night. I've noticed every time I'm studying, my CO detectors go off, and I mysteriously fall asleep while running the calculator. I seem to wake up when the auto-off feature activates. Odd
this is absolutely hilarious because i had that exact same model of calculator, knocked it off the desk, and realized the solar panel was fake too. amazing how something so specific happens to two completely different people by sheer chance. and yes i also liked how the buttons feel
actually makes sense, since they probably have plastic molds and no sticker production system, just using available plastic pellets would be cheaper than ordering stickers from someone else and having someone man that part.
I don't understand how I catch myself watching 18 minute long videos from start to finish about how some calculators have fake solar cells. I have work in the morning. The fuck am I doing with my life
I found 4 identical broken 'solar' calculators that had real panels, but the panels weren't wired at all. Made a small compound cell out of them, and it just barely powers a 'lucky cat' that used to be battery powered 😃
I actually have seen this trend on cheap solar electrónics, i guess it's because solar controller chips and recargable batteries Increase the cost of the product so they only put the solar panel to look good. I buyed a cheap small solar lamp and worked well for a year, the next year the lamp light become weaker even when i put the lamp for hours on the Sun, so i disesamble the lamp and found out that even when the solar panel was real it wasn't connected to the circuit.
You have to admit it’s pretty amazing that all the design work, engineering, making expensive moulds, buying in the calculating chips and batteries, raw materials, manufacturing, assembly, packaging then international shipping, distribution more freight, then unboxing and loading onto shelves… and you can buy it for a dollar or two. Then we wonder why so much goes to landfill. It’s just crazy.
the labor is subsidized by the government, the elected officials get elected by selling the idea of more jobs in their region to the voters, the voters commonly work jobs that are demanding enough but also simple enough to make them lower class at least for some period of time, the myriad volumes of cheap products constantly thrown away when the common folk suffer for long enough to earn something that is slightly less trash than the cheap products and the resulting cynicism, illness, and death from their earlier years removes a considerable amount of them from their identity as a voter and the cycle continues. its grim, i know. all the content out there on the internet doesnt actually help. the algorithms that direct you towards fun educational content also balance that out by cramming nonsense into your feeds. there is a phenomenon in competitive online videogames called skill based matchmaking or SBMM that is algoritmically pairing people with teammates that cause them to win as close to 50% of the time as possible for various reasons and the algorithms on sites like RU-vid work the same way. you and i and everyone else are all expendable, variables in an equation which serves the singular purpose of the sum of all things reaching zero (0). again, i apologize if it is grim, on an individual level it transforms from good thing to bad thing in a fluid sort of way but in a general sense it is actually kind of ruining the entire planet.
I suddenly have a question about those slot-in-your-front-door mail boxes, and couldn't those doors be pulled out of their frames with a piece of pipe, a chain and a truck. And maybe I've just found the right person to check this out. Btw, I liked this video, too.
Your front door, mailbox or no, if made of wood, can be broken open by a couple of guys with $12 steel sledge hammers from Home Depot in about 20 seconds. Or using a drill with a keyhole bit and reciprocating saw in 2 minutes. Or can be opened without breaking with a $50 lock pick in maybe 6 minutes.
I remember my first digital calculator. In the 1970s Radio Shack offered a four function LED calculator for $99 plus tax. I thought it was worth every penny. $100 in 1975 was equivalent to $485 today. Dollar Tree sell scientific calculators now for $1.00
A good Texas Instruments graphing/advanced calculator can still go for a few hundred. Still overpriced in my opinion, but it’s mostly due to the proprietary hardware TI uses. They’re designed in such a way that all of the computations are performed by the chip architecture rather than logic patterns on a processor. Makes them super-duper-quick and efficient at mathematical calculations.
in the 80s my friends walkman stopped working. we took it apart. they had bass boast buttons. it was a noise clicker. it didn't do anything, just clicked real loud
BADD1ONE Usually the bass boost button just mutes the bass tones when it's not pushed in, so that if you dont turn it on the music sounds worse. Tricks people into thinking the bass boost is a good thing.
One reason (that I can think of) for fake solar cells is that the original injection mold has a space for solar cells, but the factory no longer makes solar cells and uses batteries exclusively. Given that a new injection mold can cost upwards of $250,000 USD, it's better to just put in a fake solar cell than to build a new injection mold.
I had a real solar calculator for a long time. I always loved playing with the solar panel by covering it up and making it slowly fade out and power off then give it light again so it popped back on.
Imagine a guy holding up a bank with nothing but a calculator in his hand, and he asks the person behind the counter for "all the calculators in the drawer and no one gets subtracted."
I dont know how it works where you guys live but here when you get a office you can do what you want with all the stuff the person before didnt bother to remove
i remember when i was doing an algebra test in high school. my calculator stopped working so i asked my professor if i could get up and use it next to the window so that i could continue calculating stuff. he accepted, and the calculator did indeed keep working as long as the sun kept hitting the small panel on it. my professor however did not trust his students at all so he basically stood behind me, staring at me and making sure i was not trying to cheat on the test (there were some other students sitting nearby and i could have theoretically given their tests a peek- but i did not for obvious reasons) still odd that so many cheap calculators have dummy solar panels. mines actually worked, which is not uncommon, and helped me quite a bit. i loved that calculator... then i lost it. still have some odd memories associated to it, like the one i narrated just now.
ever seen a car with plastic covers over the cigarette lighters. because some models of car come with the cigarette lighters and others don't. it's the same situation here they use the same plastic mould. and the cheaper version doesn't come with the solar panel so they have to fill it with something and you get a piece of black plastic.
I remember having a Solar-only powered battery. It had like 1 millimeter of thickness and when I covered the panel with my finger during a calculation, it could do crazy things. (i.e. 3+3= 777777777...) EDIT: I meant calculator, not battery. 3 years passed and I only now noticed the error.
The diode at 13:20 is a backflow blocking diode. It is to prevent the solar cell from trying to change a non-rechargeable battery. There must have been a mistake in the PCB because they are most often part of the PCB. This was a fix so they could use the PCBs for this unit. Either that or the PCB was also used in a battery only unit but by adding the diode they could use it in this unit.
It's installed the other way. It's there to keep the battery from discharging into the solar cell. The solar cell isn't going to produce enough energy to do any harm to that button cell, but the solar cell does present a load to the battery when it's not producing, and they just wired them in parallel, probably because the chipblob board they used didn't have an isolated input for the solar cell. :/
@@SwervingLemoni think this is a more plasuable explanation. Since solar cells acts almost like an LED and will drain the battery continuously if without a diode
I never considered the possibility the "solar cells " were fake though i have wondered how they made them cheap enough to have them on such low cost calculators, so i am surprised they are faked but not exactly shocked.
Studio Papa I posted comment before I got to the part where he explained that, but I suppose JSD could still be upset seeing his beloved former calculator being "ruined".
I do remember 6th grade math class, circa 2005, we had solar calculators. I could cover the panel and the calculator would dim out. They were pretty cheap as I recall
There is a reason: some (real) solar calculators are dual power (i.e. there is a battery in parallel to the solar panel, and the battery and solar panel have both a diode to prevent either one "recharging" the other). If you leave the calculator ON in a drawer where there is no sunlight, you'll drain the battery :)
I dont want my calculator ready to calculate all the time, but i could also imagine maybe for a real one, turning off the circuit could make it last longer
You're right, I AM shocked! I didn't know that this was a thing... Also, I caught the homage to at least 3 different YT channels (was expecting puppets after the bongo riff). If only you had revealed the "chooch factor" of the calculators and made a Duke Nukem reference... :-)
Something inside me died a little… I am actually tempted to get my solar desk-calculator from the late 90s and open it up. Let's hope this one was still the real deal. I remember having a little solar calculator and when you blocked the Solar panel the LCD actually got dim. So that one must have been real.
I had that telstar calculator as a kid. I dropped it, dislodged the "solar panel" and tried to fix it to great disappointment. It inspired a life long fascination with how things work, and all the secrets that hide in even the most mundane objects.
+Adrian Miska: I clicked on it because the thumbnail does not have big tits, bikini, and the text doesn't say "You won't believe what she did", "You won't believe what the cameraman saw", "the 10 greatest something something".
You can FUCK WITH PEOPLE this way just replace the MRC button with the EQUALS button and when you do a calculation, you input whatever numbers you want and press M+ then, you can just show it to people and do their calculation and when you press =, it will not compute whatever you inputed, it will show the answer to the previous calculation I believe this was done in an episode of "The Real Hustle" where they set up a fake money exchange and they would do this to people where they would use a 10% smaller exchange transaction ratio than the real one, and when they showed it to people, "proving" it was 100% legit they managed to fool everyone into giving them less money for their exchange noice
My mom had a calculator shaped after a credit card. ALMOST SAME THICKNESS. It was too thin to even have a battery, and could fit in any wallet. Lovely little calculator. Never seen any calculator like it after that.
I remember I had this calculator that was basically a clear thin piece of plastic and it had almost touch screen buttons and was powered completely on the solar panel. That thing was pretty cool
I have a chocolate calculator. The solar cell actually works. I had it since middle school. But i remember the display would dim if you covered the panel. I also made it glitch out one time like that.
My best guess is that the manufacturer also produces another model of calculator with a functioning solar cell that uses the exact same molds for the case. It's cheaper to just cover up the slot with a thin plastic film than to shut down the supply line to change out the molds for ones without the slot.
that's exactly what it is. and a lot of the time the version with the solar panel is no longer sold. sudden they don't even bother anymore. remember this technologies decades and decades old. so if you're buying it from Walmart for $1 how much is Walmart buying it for? 10 cents
Kids these days don't even know they're born. Back in Korea^WNam^Wthe70's^Wthe day we used to hacksaw the tops offa 2n3055's and put them in bright sunlight to get 2uA into 1Meg load. But we were happy. And healthy too. And we couldn't even spell Shokley properly - we still can't - because we had no light to learn by. Those were the days.
I discovered a phony solar cell a few years ago when I replaced the batteries in a Office Depot branded calculator. And that was a $10 calculator. My dad used to put his calculators in the windowsill because he thought the solar cell would recharge the battery.
It's crazy to me companies can sell solar yard lights for a dollar and then act like it's too expensive to put a much smaller solar cell on a calculator that costs more.
Great video, but I don't get it. The fake panels add manufacturing expense... Is there really a driving market demand for dual power calculators? Or is this just manufactures re-using plastic molds from more expensive (real solar panel) models/brands to save on design costs?
Because changing the mold for the calculator would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. So they use the same form with a fake panel in it. IT doesn't change the actual function of the calculator at all.
what people still use sundials what is this 1985 hello McFly!!! tee hee! just kidding dude, chill out, no need to stop drop and roll, but anal sex is surprisingly nutritious my good lad ;)
Candycorn 2014 Being more intelligent than you, he knew everyone would know what meant when he used the common and convenient term "solar cell" Effective speaking involves who the audience is. :)
that's true too. Funny thing about those $1 calculators are that the button batteries cost more than they do... I haven't seen button batteries for $1 (at least were I live)
Memories!! I remember we had a really good, German-brand, real dual-power calculator in my childhood. I accidentally broke the solar cell as I was opening it up out of curiosity, and then it fell out… so I took a piece of paper and tried to draw a bad sketch of a solar cell and placed it right where the original was, because I was scared that my dad would notice. I think he must have, but he always made it appear as if he didn’t notice it. When I asked him about it when I got older, he said that he just didn’t want to upset me as a child and let me be creative and curious… I really have an amazing dad! 🥺
Hopefully neither it nor the citation of this video will be removed. Many Wikipedia editors slavishly remove all RU-vid-based citations, considering it an unreliable source. I say it's absurd to blanket-reject all RU-vid citations, since there are cases like this one where a RU-vid video is the best (or in some cases only) reference for a fact. Plus, common sense can tell you whether a video was likely to have been faked, and thus should not be considered a reliable source.
+Nothing in Particular: Comments with URLs in them tend to get held to be moderated by the channel owner, but I believe notification emails still get sent at the time the comment is originally posted _(when_ they get sent -- I dunno if there's any logic to when they get sent and when they don't; I didn't receive an email when you replied, for instance, and just discovered your comment now), so that being said, here's the URL of the article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-powered_calculator
DanHarkless - You have restored balance to what was once a poor excuse of a Wikipedia article. On behalf of the International Solar Calculator Society (ISCS), I thank you for your service.
i used to always take them apart and take the " solar panel " off cause after you removed some foam, wires and tint you got a very nice sharp glass rectangle that scratched almost everything, fun af
they work really good for parting out lines of flour on a cd case so you can sweat all the CoHoes at the party...u will be Mr. Popular quick after a stunt like that ....till they see its flour....
It'd be a very inefficient way of making any kind of worthwhile wattage or current, I expect... but it could certainly be a pretty interesting alternative to a traditional step-up transformer if you got, say, 100 of them and wired them all up in series. A 20x5 grid of PV strips wouldn't even be too large (well, after all, it's 400 of those little squares), but it would then put out 160 volts DC (at, thankfully, a low current, and without much in the way of stored energy behind) when that same light was shone at it. Or still a good few dozen in ambient lighting. Which could give you the ability to deliver mild, joke-shop grade static-esque shocks to random people using nothing but the power of available light and some very simple cabling. However I bet there's a supplier somewhere that will sell you a literal bucket of the miniature PV strips, enough to make an entire business suit out of, for not very much money at all. You don't need the rest of the calculators, just the PVs. A few thousand of those in series, and assuming it doesn't exceed some kind of breakdown voltage in the cells (as far as each is concerned after all, they've only got 1.6v across them, even if that IS the difference between 230v and 231.6v) and is properly insulated, you could start emitting solar-powered plasma-ball style mini lightning and glows as you turn any nearby light into multiple-kilovolt glows and sparks. I wonder even if it would be enough for the Emperor's sith-lightning effects from Return of the Jedi. It need not carry quite so much paralysing power, just... yknow... be lightning shot from the fingers with no obvious central power source. Hmm..
I have an old air conditioning and heater thermostat which can be programmed for every day of the week at four different times. It is an old thing but does the job. Also, It is not intrusive like the new wifi ones. A few months ago, it stopped working, nothing on display. I disassemble it and checked all voltages and soldering, and everything looked OK. I took the microscope out and started poking around to see the signals coming out of the micro; nothing, it was dead. Then, I checked the realtime crystal oscillator, and it looked like the micro was trying to start it every two seconds. I ordered the part from Digi-Key and replaced the realtime clock. This fixed it. I could have bought a new one, but I like this one.
Game Hazard graphing calculators are an absolute waste of money(Ti ones) Cpu chips has gotten pretty cheap so Idk why I am paying above 100 dollars for a potato cpu and a calculator that barely works (I had a Ti 84 plus c that broke on me 4 times whilst on warranty and once out of it)
DELTA Delta but its not as cool. I have 2 (technically 3) apps. They work better than any market calculator, but i cant say its custom made. I cant say it has every feature i could want!
lmaooo wow not even an actual solar cell. i had no idea this was even a thing. you totally reminded me of covering up a solar calculator and watching the display fade out. man that takes me back hah
I wonder what JSD from work would say if he saw this video and found that his solar calculator vanished from the office just to be butchered in a YT video.
This made me real curious about my own calculators, because I was sure I had one of those Big Display calculators! Obviously, I started with a Big Display calculator that looked almost identical to the silver one he opened at the very end. You know, the one that used to belong to Ms Dorothy Sheehy ? So I opened it up, and it looked EXACTLY like the silver Big Display calculator ... except it DID have a solar panel in it ! And it worked without the battery in it, so it was a REAL solar panel too. Talk about a surprise! I was not done with surprises though. I opened up my Texas Instruments Ti-30X II S ... probably cost me about 20 bucks, 15 years ago or so. And sure enough, it had both battery and solar panel inside, but the solar panel had a surprise in wait for me. Pulling the battery it still worked fine doing simple calculations, just like expected. But when you did complex stuff, the solar panel wasn't strong enough, or the capacitors were too small. It sure ran out of power quickly, but the panel was working. What an interesting surprise, this was turning out to be quite fun. But ... well, you can probably guess it already - I was not done with surprises just yet. I finally got my hands on oldest and most broken calculator, a Texas Instruments Ti-106. I bought it back in 1998, it has been with me in classrooms, at home, and in a gravel pit. It has been "dipped" in coffee or Sodapop more times than I can count. It has generally lived a hard life. Last time I lend it out to a friend, it came back with a broken display - But it still turns on. Only reason I hadn't thrown it out, was because I had put it in a spot where I had forgotten about it. So I opened it up to see if it really had a solar panel - And sure enough, it did have one .. a real one too. How do I know ? Because it doesn't have a battery. Just the solar panel !
The one I regularly took apart during high school classes would still work without the chemical battery afaik. After covering the solar cell (and the chemical cell taken out ofc) the display would quickly fade and pressing any of the buttons would drain all the voltage ~immediately. But in direct sunlight it was perfectly fine and happily working
It is cheaper to just use the same casing for both solar and battery calculators. In the battery ones, they just put a fake solar cell in, and in solar an actual solar cell. Calc manufacturers have been doing this as long as solar calcs have existed..
That kind of makes sense, but it would make more sense if they didn't make the fake part look like a solar panel if they weren't trying to be misleading. I would also say they would only have been like that since extremely cheap solar calculators have been made. Decades ago, all calculators that looked like they were solar, were. But they weren't as cheap, and were often brand name.
Many manufacturers use the same injection moulded frame for a range of calculators so it's cheaper to fill in the unused solar panel hole than it is to create a new mould.
I've just stumbled upon your video by chance and I gotta say I'm very grateful for it. I have learned today the answer that I've been searching my whole life regarding these devices. Sir, I salute you!
Bryan Shuler lmao and he didn’t even know this video was going to blow up some how. I wonder who he even thought was going to see this if it didn’t blow up lol
Fun fact; The reason the pocket calculator doesn't give 2 as the result of sqrt(2) * sqrt(2) is because it's using a truncated data type (or more likely, it's just doing binary addition using a simple ALU that cannot handle enough significant digits). A simplified example: sqrt(2) truncated to 3 digits = 1,41 1,41 * 1,41 = 1,9881
I was going to say something like this. Though it's in part because root 2 is irrational, so you would need to store an infinite number of decimal places to store it precisely, therefore any stored representation of it will always be a little bit out from the true value. Also if the displayed answer was limited to less decimal places than the input that would result in some rounding that would potentially give the answer as 2, which would be indicative of a cheaper, or at least more restricted one, rather than a better or more expensive one surely?
+Feroz It's a physical limitation of computers (for this example you can equate 'wires' with 'bits') We can use 1 wire to represent the numbers: 0 and 1 wire1 OFF (we may call this 0) ON (we may call this 1) we can use 2 wires to represent the numbers: 0 thru 3 just use all different combinations of ON and OFF to represent different numbers wire1 wire2 number OFF OFF (0) OFF ON (1) ON OFF (2) ON ON (3) we can use 3 wires to represent the numbers 0 thru 7 wire1 wire2 wire3 number OFF OFF OFF (0) OFF OFF ON (1) OFF ON OFF (2) OFF ON ON (3) ON OFF OFF (4) ON OFF ON (5) ON ON OFF (6) ON ON ON (7) and so on... To represent larger numbers, or more decimals, you need more wires but we can't use too many wires otherwise it might not fit in the calculator. This is why you get an error if you multiply with huge numbers with calculators, or get rounding errors with decimals.
I'm pretty sure those little chocolate calculators you'd get from those scholastic book fairs are only solar. I remember if you were slightly in the shade it would just completely turn off.
In my (decidedly NOT cheap) Casio calculator, which is dual-powered, there is a little "sun" indicator on the LCD panel which shows when it's getting adequate power from the solar cell. According to the manual, the calculator needs a working battery to be used, but the solar cell makes the battery last longer. As of right now, I've never had to replace the battery (unlike in my watch), so I assume it works as advertised. (It also helps that Casio is a reputable brand in this space.)
The smart living calculator might actually be good. I might be remembering this wrong, but I've read that a solar cell can actually charge or drain a battery. So, a diode is used to make sure that electricity only flows in one direction so that the solar cell only charges. That looked like a germanium diode, which ain't cheap. I'm guessing that they left the leads long in case the unit didn't work, so they could take it out and put it with some other board. The diode might also have been a last minute addition. I don't know, I'm just a Pretengineer.
I remember having a 'dual power' calculator many years ago and I deliberately took out the battery so it ONLY worked on solar power. Didn't feel like having to replace it all the time lol
I have a calculator like that, it takes 1 AA battery, I normally just use it as a solar only calculator, of there is no battery in there it cannot leak.
