i found a little radio in the park while trying to stay up on a skateboard

it was clearly made by not complete dicks, as you can see by the 3 standard cross screws holding it together

inside it's a pretty standard am/fm radio board.

·big fan· of this shitty speaker solution, a piezo resting directly on the battery pack

also this am antenna is... clever? honestly this whole thing looks like a student capstone project and i am so here for it

the battery holder is a very standard AAA doodad

it should not make me emotional that none of these parts are glued in but here we are. also if i am taking things apart at 8am i am probably already emotional so

the whole board comes loose with two screws. handy.

i always enjoy button solutions... these ones are cute. at least the design allows for the board to easily be separated from the case while still having relatively functional controls

this is a very ugly soldering job but hey it's just structural

unfortunately the soldering on the am antenna is also messy, and moments after i took this the negative lead detached

a board like this is what i would call "legible" - what i mean by that is that, because of the nature of the thing, you can see the individual components and decipher their functionality. most of the parts are surface-mount capacitors and resistors.

there are a few ways to research components... most have some sort of marking, like this. i am gonna have to get a magnifier to read the markings though. one site i've found useful in the past for things with less thorough marking than this chip is http://www.random-science-tools.com/electronics/SMD_markings.php

that square chip comes from a company called CACHIP. this particular one is no longer in production, or at least is no longer on their website. the closest model number advertises a small amount of RAM & ROM and an LCD controller, which makes sense for its location behind the LCD

based on the traces i can follow, the square chip is also probably running the buttons and, given that there is a clock next to it, managing the clock. this chip, on the other hand, probably just does radio things. educated guess.

the square chip also manages the audio output, directed either to the headphone jack or the very silly piezo. and probably does whatever "bass boost" means, which this thing apparently has per its listing at walmart

there is no evidence of a secondary battery so there is no stable memory - confirmed before i accidentally pulled the battery pack off that the clock resets when the batteries are pulled

this is about as far as i feel like going today, but i may re-attach the things I accidentally removed later and then see what i can do about re-purposing this thingy. the microchip does have exposed transfer and receive pads so that's worth investigating