starting off today with oatmeal raisin crease stahoot
from strathcona beer company in vancouver bc so judging by what it says in the can it's
an oatmeal stout it has some chocolate and some raisins fermented in with it sounds interesting
so today i'm going to be playing with this little game here you may have seen these before
it's been around since what did it say on the website 2003 i think we started making these
and this is actually based on a database that was generally that was created as part of an ai for an
online game at uh what is it 20q.net i'll link to that down below but the premise of this game
is it asks you 20 questions hence the name 20 questions and you answer by pushing the
various buttons here there's a yes and a no one unknown and sometimes to answer its questions
and you can see just slightly on the screen there i think that it's uh sitting ready waiting for
me to push a button you can also note that the top right quadrant of the screen is buggered up
in addition to that it looks like there's a bit of a vertical bar just sort of in the uh in the uh
one-third position as well anyway this one was dropped off to me mostly because the screen
is a little bit buggered up and i'm guessing that there's a little zebra stripe on the back of that
screen that is making poor contact um or i can sort of see in through the case i'm not sure
if you can see it or not but back there there's a ribbon cable a flat flex ribbon cable folded over
yeah there you can just sort of see the white and the strips of it so if the screen is repairable
i'm guessing that's what it's going to be but then i sort of fell down a rabbit hole looking
into the history of this thing and just the game itself and apparently the online version
which this is based on has a full neural net running in the background
to uh to learn from your answers so that it can improve its questions for future visitors
this one and there's several versions of it made over the years
uses as i said a subset of that database inside it and apparently it's about 80 percent accurate and
it's guessing what you're thinking i don't think there's going to be any way to look into what the
database of the software is doing inside this thing it's probably just on a blob chip but
uh we'll at least see what the display technology looks like if nothing else and a couple little
tiny screws in there underneath the batteries there we go so two side buttons pop off oh yeah
the two side buttons uh are designed to speed up and slow down the rate of play of the game and
yeah we can see inside everything's happening inside one little bob chip so there'll be no
delving into what's going on in there over here we've got just a little electrolytic capacitor so
presumably just smoothing out the bumps and the power i would guess
and then we got four screws holding that piece in and there's a little tripper buzzer there too
because it does make a few noises at you i think you noticed it when it woke up earlier
then as it's playing it will uh chirp at you so there's four screws dropped out
save them for later uh what can we see there is the keypad with little resistive switches
a little bit of crud on there i'll clean that up later and the more i look at it the more it seems
that that flat flex is not actually going to a zebra strip it's just going straight onto there
okay that's problematic i don't know that i'm going to be able to do anything about that
but we'll take it one step further apart it is a very tightly assembled little device
and a lot of screws in there
so two more screws to take the lcd bezel off so that guy comes off there come on
and oh that flat flex is torn oh [ __ ]
now if that was already in a weakened cracked state that would explain the display
so if it wasn't then i think i may oh somebody a new device damn it
i'm gonna put this back together off camera
i think and uh yeah oops
all right makes noise that's good and the screen is even more buggered up than i started well
looks like i'm going shopping to uh replace this thing for my buddy that lent it to me sorry man
on the in my defense it was already kind of damaged however
he liked this game so much that he had another version of it this one here which
uses persistence of vision for the display it's exactly the same game exactly the same game play
um let me crank up the iris a little bit on the camera and you can see the persistence
of vision uh display a little bit better now i was going to take it apart and show you how
the person's vision display works but now i'm a little scared but i think i will anyway no guts
no glory or something like that let me just open the bottom of this guy the battery compartment out
ooh c cells wow this thing will run forever or maybe not it's got a motor
in there driving that pov display there appears to be eight screws holding this thing together
four in those holes and four under the feet okay there we go
so the top and the bottom are held together by a small handful of wires uh going to the power
switch the battery box and this little speaker here with the capacitor in series okay yeah
okay i can't see a way to take this apart easily without messing with the mechanics and given
what happened on the last one i'm not going to get that carried away
in here so if we use a bit of creative camera working a bit of creative lighting
we can sort of see what's going on inside this thing see there's that circuit board
sitting on top of a motor shaft so there's a small handful components on there and
you can see that there's a wiper to the motor shaft to pick up power right there a capacitor
for presumably power supply just to smooth it out just in case that's a little ripply and rubby so
on the underside of this side of the board there's what looks like an infrared receiver another
capacitor and what appears to be an infrared led and over on this side we have an led facing down
and we have an array of eight leds up here which are the pixels for the actual display
and then inside the dome there is a couple of leds one back there and one back there on
the base and then over here there's what looks like an infrared device and that infrared device
there is lined up with the infrared devices on the bottom side of the spinning board
and then these two leds that one and that one are lined up with the other two devices
with the what looks like here the other infrared device out there and the other led that's
on the board in there so that will be how it's communicating between the base
and the top there's a couple of things going on it has to communicate the pixel data for these things
and it has to communicate where in rotation this top board is in relation to what's
going on down below and sort of see it right there there's a little blob chip
that will be handling the infrared communication back and forth at the bottom
um so the game date is being generated down the bottom and just transmitted as display data
that chip will be dealing with that and telling the pixels where to go based on
based on the rotational position so that is sort of interesting i wish i had a way of
getting into this thing further without with enough confidence that i wouldn't destroy it
because i kind of don't want to send these both back broken that would just suck
so there we go that was uh that was kind of interesting i am disappointed in myself for going
deeper than i should have gone with this one and those little flat flex ribbons going on to glass
lcds somebody may be able to repair them but that's way beyond my skill level
um so i think i'm going to go shopping and see if i find another one of those for him because
i know he uses that i know he takes it with him when he's going ice fishing and whatnot
um but at least i didn't damage this one unfortunately we didn't get in deep enough
to see the mechanism up close and personal but i think we got the general gist of it anyway uh
thanks for watching uh questions comments down below um feel free to critique my uh
capabilities because i'm sure some of you will anyways regardless uh i will talk to you later