OT: What kind of madness is this?

[peace brainerd]

Hope you don't mind an interesting little diversion here... fascinated me anyway.

I was at a thrift store this morning and noticed this medical device for two bucks (half off certain items today!). It really pegged my bullcrap meter as I looked at it and thought it might be fun to actually look inside. Especially when I noted the sticker on the back warning "opening case voids warranty and disables instrument permanently". I just wanted to get a good laugh out of just how pathetic they dared to be when investing this "black box" with innards. It's some kind of electrotheraputic thingamabob with led readouts and handheld dongles. I suspected a board with a surplus ic and a couple of blinking leds. Or maybe empty space!

I looked it up when I got home and discovered that it was sold for anywhere from 1200 to 2000USD and landed the inventor/manufacturer in prison for pedalling a bogus medical device. He made 8 million dollars on them. What fun! I couldn't wait to look inside.
Man Sentenced For Selling Illegal Medical Device - San Diego News Story - KGTV San Diego

So I open it up and am a little taken aback by what appears to me, in my limited assesment, to be at least someone's concept of a working electronic device. What kind of madness actually compels someone to develop this into a 'functional' machine?

Weirder yet, in one of the photos I've provided, there appears to be a magnet affixed to the upper case/shell that ends up right next to a tiny reed switch on the board of the lower half. Almost like there really is some sort of self-destruct mechanism onboard when the cases are separated. Wow. Creepy indeed?

Can anyone comment, just from a casual glance at the boards, on just how seriously the 'inventor' was taking this thing? Does it appear to you that he believed in his enterprise? Or is this just a board from some surplus junk repurposed to look semi-legitimate?

Pics are large so I just inserted links....

http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/y...t/SDC11994.jpg
http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/y...t/SDC11982.jpg
http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/y...t/SDC11983.jpg
http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/y...t/SDC11984.jpg
http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/y...t/SDC11985.jpg
http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/y...t/SDC11987.jpg
http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/y...t/SDC11986.jpg
http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/y...t/SDC11991.jpg
http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/y...t/SDC11992.jpg

[SY]

So if 9000 people believed in this device enough to lay out thousands of smackers, why is it so unbelievable that a few dozen audiophiles (or even a few hundred) could all report that some worthless gadget or modification makes a "stunning" difference in their systems?

You made a cool find. Interesting pix and post- many thanks.

[analog_sa]

I wonder if it's illegal to sell Rife devices to audiophiles. May be an interesting venture. Any of the usual suspects here keen to clone? Group buy?

[peace brainerd]

I'm no longer surprised by placebo effects or the vagaries of other's imaginations. The fact that some of that might even "work" for users of this stuff is ok with me. And that goes for audio tweaks as well. And I positively do not want to get into any audiophile mudslinging. I'm kind of on probation for that stuff here as it is.

But for medial devices there's legitimate concern among the regulatory agencies that this sort of crap can muddy the perception of choice for people with otherwise treatable diseases who look to these devices as 'alternatives' and forego lifesaving options. But anyhoo, that's not what I found interesting when opening the case.

I just assumed that anyone pedalling this stuff MUST be 100 percent, certifiably, venal to the core... aware of their deceit, and pretty much pathologically incapable of being restrained by conscience. I guess I wanted that confirmed by finding an empty space in the chassis. So it fascinated me to discover what looks like a sincere effort. Someone appears to have put some real thought into buiding a device based on the kanoodlings of this guy Royal Rife - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Seems obvious now that I stop to consider it, but fraud may not always be so simple. I'm 99.9999999 percent certain that this thing is useless (and worse). But the inventor (the distributor in this case turns out to have been evidently, jailably, dishonest) might have had as much faith in the thing as the consumers.

[thebulbguy]

Are all of those ICs common chips, or are there any ASICs on the board? A couple of my friends and I have been working on IC reverse engineering - basically cracking the chips open through various methods and then slowly exposing each layer of the die and photographing it under a microscope. There is then image processing software that can use the shapes of common components (I forget what it is called, I do the hardware part of all of this) to produce the equivalent function of the chip from its images. I'd love to see what exactly the thing did originally - anyone know where one of those might be obtained? I'll take a look on ebay later when I'm not on my neighbor's insanely slow wireless.

[lgreen]

The device has buttons and a display- so there are a bunch of controllers to take in the numbers and show them on the display. Any other stuff in there? (I wouldn't know myself).

[SY]

Originally Posted by thebulbguy

Are all of those ICs common chips, or are there any ASICs on the board?

At least one EPROM.

[planet10]

Originally Posted by peace brainerd

I
Someone appears to have put some real thought into buiding a device based on the kanoodlings of this guy Royal Rife - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

There is one paragraph in that Wikipedia article:

Rife claimed that he could find a Mortal Oscillatory Rate[4] (MOR) for various pathogenic organisms, and directed his research accordingly, culturing and testing various pathogens with his Universal #3 microscope and his directed radio frequency energy 'beam ray' tube machine. Rife claimed to have documented the precise frequencies which destroyed specific organisms. According to the San Diego Evening Tribune in 1938[4] "We do not wish at this time," Rife commented, " to claim that we cured cancer, or any other disease, for that matter. But we can say that these waves or the 'ray' has the power of devitalizing disease organisms, of 'killing ' them, when tuned to an exact particular wave length, or frequency, for each different organism. This applies to the organisms both in their free state and, with certain exceptions, when they are living tissues."

The way i read this, it is close to a description of the techniques they are now using to target a malignant growth with radioactive tracers and then giving them a high intensity jolt (xRays etc) to kill the cancer.

dave

[Allen Wright]

Is there any hint of what it's intended to do?

Someone has spent a LOT of time designing and laying out the pcb, so I can't imagine it's an effort to rip peopl eoff.

the designer at least must have considered it did something very useful and valuable.

Have you tried running it? measuring the output? Or did you just pull it apart?

regards, Allen

[thebulbguy]

I would definitely love to see what is on that EPROM. The two Philips chips in the 7th picture are LED drivers and the big Intel DIP is an 8 bit microcontroller. I'm still looking into the other ones, particularly that Qualcomm one on the bottom (but if it does have anything to do with RF I'm guessing that is the chip to handle that stuff). The reed switch looks to be wired to the power supply area and the EPROM, so maybe opening the case wiped its contents.