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/yy303/svejkovat/SDC11994.jpg
http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/yy303/svejkovat/SDC11982.jpg
http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/yy303/svejkovat/SDC11983.jpg
http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/yy303/svejkovat/SDC11984.jpg
http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/yy303/svejkovat/SDC11985.jpg
http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/yy303/svejkovat/SDC11987.jpg
http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/yy303/svejkovat/SDC11986.jpg
http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/yy303/svejkovat/SDC11991.jpg
http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/yy303/svejkovat/SDC11992.jpg
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/yy303/svejkovat/SDC11994.jpg
http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/yy303/svejkovat/SDC11982.jpg
http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/yy303/svejkovat/SDC11983.jpg
http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/yy303/svejkovat/SDC11984.jpg
http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/yy303/svejkovat/SDC11985.jpg
http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/yy303/svejkovat/SDC11987.jpg
http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/yy303/svejkovat/SDC11986.jpg
http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/yy303/svejkovat/SDC11991.jpg
http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/yy303/svejkovat/SDC11992.jpg
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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.
You made a cool find. Interesting pix and post- many thanks.
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?
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.
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.
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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.
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).
There is one paragraph in that Wikipedia article:
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
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
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
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.
If I plan to sell something for $1500-2000, I think I wouldn;t mind putting some time into the design, even if it does nothing more than blink and put up numbers. If you plan to con someone, the whole point is to make the con believable.
"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."
Yes, and when writing the baloney script, one always tries to make it sound vaguely familiar. Same deal as claiming your motor oil is better because some astronaut at NASA uses it in his car.
Looking at the reed switch, right next to a battery, I'd be betting that the reed switch when the magnet is removed either breaks the battery connection, thus causing any memory in RAM to forget, or possibly it shorts across the battery voltage at some point with the same effect. Load a program into RAM and send it out, anyone opens it, it forgets its programming.
That Amazon/KD board number is probably a clue as to what the thing really might be. Or it could be a red herring.
"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."
Yes, and when writing the baloney script, one always tries to make it sound vaguely familiar. Same deal as claiming your motor oil is better because some astronaut at NASA uses it in his car.
Looking at the reed switch, right next to a battery, I'd be betting that the reed switch when the magnet is removed either breaks the battery connection, thus causing any memory in RAM to forget, or possibly it shorts across the battery voltage at some point with the same effect. Load a program into RAM and send it out, anyone opens it, it forgets its programming.
That Amazon/KD board number is probably a clue as to what the thing really might be. Or it could be a red herring.
No, I really don't think so. No bit of electronics us unlikely to give out a frequency or wavelength in the x-ray band, and surely not at a significant amount of power.
The electromagnetic spectrum is pretty big (I'm thinking of ELF to all radio to heat, light, UV, x-ray to gamma rays, probably over 12 orders of magnitude, whether measured by frequency or wavelengh). X-rays are on the other side of light from what this thing surely generates. And that's presuming it actually generates anything other than a scanned 7-segment LED display.
I see the Qualcom chip and the Microchip 28C64A (I'm guessing an OTP EPROM), but this device could well have been made for some other function, with the front panel and buttons screened with the text for this quack-device and maybe even new code written for the quartz-window EPROM, and the other devices doing absolutely nothing in this implementation. These could have been a large quantity of an obsoleted device sold as surplus, and then repurposed by this shyster. I really wouldn't give him too much credit for many reasons, one being you wouldn't have to design such a thing from scratch.
I don't see that. Seeing how, as the article said, these were sold for several hundred to up to $5,000 each, yes, they are "very valuable" as high-tech (looking, anyway ) snake oil. If the guy has a few thousand dollars he cold have at worst case have the thing designed and a quantity made, and from there he only has to run his sales pitch and exchange these things for substantial amounts of money from the victims.
These devices apparently aren't anything but buttons and flashing lights. It's the promises people were told about them that's the problem.
Quite relevantly, I just saw the Ted talk by James Randi where he mentions people cashing in their life savings for predators like this.
Is there some large capacitor wired to the reed switch that might hold a charge after power is removed? Does removing the magnet cause the reed switch to close, or to open up? Worst case these extra parts are a couple of dollars, and for a several hundred dollar device, they could even do absolutely nothing to the circuit, but make the user think he's screwed up the device by opening it up. Even so, it would be easy enough for it to blow out a signal diode, which a logic I/O pin or two then find it to be open or shorted rather than normally operating, prompting the program to display an error code (or set one display digit to full brightness, giving the impression the multiplexing code isn't running) rather than running the main program. It doesn't have to actually destroy the EPROM, just make the user think it's been destroyed.
Probably like many others here, I've done my share of embedded programming, and have plenty of devious ideas of the things this could do and how it could do them.
Of course this device is not capable... my comment was soley to the semi-related reference to the Wikipedia article. The idea of zapping the "bugs" with energy to kill them.
dave
I have a story.
Years ago I met this "natural healer" who wasn't adverse to using technology to cure. He used to broadcast cures via radio waves to his paying customers. He would wave a dousing rod around the patient and match their aura color to tuffs of wool in a large book. If there was too much of one color in their aura he would charge them to broadcast a correcting color from his home base 24-7. There he had racks of transmitters one for each patient, and as he was driving around the country in a truck towing a luxurious caravan which was his portable consulting rooms I take it that it was quite a profitable business.
Anyway he showed me one of his electrical devices which he used in front of the patients to 'potentiate' the pills he also prescribed and sold. It was stashed under other stuff in a cupboard. It was a panel about 1 ft square and covered in calibrated knobs with a cup in the centre to hold the pills. He said he didn't know how it worked but it just did. I was of course most interested and asked if I could take a look inside.
A few screws later and the panel was off before he could change his mind, though I think he was curious as well as he had not made it himself. There was no power supply of any description, and merely consisted of potentiometers and a lot of loose wiring there was a wire on every tag, and a real tangle, so it wasn't dealing with RF! I gave up when I looked at the pill receptical which I recognised as being a plastic 35mm film cannister with four wires just butting up to 4 sides. No actual circuit for any current to flow. He asked me what I thought.
I said it doesn't conform to any know electrical laws or practice that I was aware of and so I was at a loss to explain it. He seemed quite pleased with this. I buttoned it up and he stowed it away and we sat around talking of other matters whilst enjoying a cup of tea.
A while later he seemed to become agitated and kept glancing around the caravan. I said what's up, he then asked me if I had returned all the dials on the machine to zero. I couldn't remember, and he said if you leave the dials off zero it sends out an energy field which he can feel.
So he goes to the cupboard and removes all this stuff to get to the machine, and sure enough, just as he had predicted the dials were all over the place. He reset them all to zero before restashing the machine. When he sat back down even I could tell he was much more relaxed. We never got onto HiFi.
Years ago I met this "natural healer" who wasn't adverse to using technology to cure. He used to broadcast cures via radio waves to his paying customers. He would wave a dousing rod around the patient and match their aura color to tuffs of wool in a large book. If there was too much of one color in their aura he would charge them to broadcast a correcting color from his home base 24-7. There he had racks of transmitters one for each patient, and as he was driving around the country in a truck towing a luxurious caravan which was his portable consulting rooms I take it that it was quite a profitable business.
Anyway he showed me one of his electrical devices which he used in front of the patients to 'potentiate' the pills he also prescribed and sold. It was stashed under other stuff in a cupboard. It was a panel about 1 ft square and covered in calibrated knobs with a cup in the centre to hold the pills. He said he didn't know how it worked but it just did. I was of course most interested and asked if I could take a look inside.
A few screws later and the panel was off before he could change his mind, though I think he was curious as well as he had not made it himself. There was no power supply of any description, and merely consisted of potentiometers and a lot of loose wiring there was a wire on every tag, and a real tangle, so it wasn't dealing with RF! I gave up when I looked at the pill receptical which I recognised as being a plastic 35mm film cannister with four wires just butting up to 4 sides. No actual circuit for any current to flow. He asked me what I thought.
I said it doesn't conform to any know electrical laws or practice that I was aware of and so I was at a loss to explain it. He seemed quite pleased with this. I buttoned it up and he stowed it away and we sat around talking of other matters whilst enjoying a cup of tea.
A while later he seemed to become agitated and kept glancing around the caravan. I said what's up, he then asked me if I had returned all the dials on the machine to zero. I couldn't remember, and he said if you leave the dials off zero it sends out an energy field which he can feel.
So he goes to the cupboard and removes all this stuff to get to the machine, and sure enough, just as he had predicted the dials were all over the place. He reset them all to zero before restashing the machine. When he sat back down even I could tell he was much more relaxed. We never got onto HiFi.
Little need to reverse anything. As becomes any truly loony pursuit, there is more than abundant info on the net. And a vast Rife subculture.
www.rife.org
Research into the Resonance Therapy and Rife Microscope, Rife Research - Europe
Royal Raymond Rife
Royal Rife Technologies
Some manufacturers probably have more sensible small print
Pulsed Technologies - precision resonant frequency and pulsed plasma devices
And others cater for the newbies not so inclined to invest
Rife Machine for under $100 : rife generator : Royal Rife
The Beam Ray machine
The 1939 Beam Ray Machine
And how to beat an electron microscope into a pulp
THE RIFE MICROSCOPE BY GARY WADE
www.rife.org
Research into the Resonance Therapy and Rife Microscope, Rife Research - Europe
Royal Raymond Rife
Royal Rife Technologies
Some manufacturers probably have more sensible small print
Pulsed Technologies - precision resonant frequency and pulsed plasma devices
And others cater for the newbies not so inclined to invest
Rife Machine for under $100 : rife generator : Royal Rife
The Beam Ray machine
The 1939 Beam Ray Machine
And how to beat an electron microscope into a pulp
THE RIFE MICROSCOPE BY GARY WADE
All it needs is a reference to some Quantum Effect and it could be re-badged as an Audio Room purifier or similar, the electrodes creating an optimum electro-magnetic background in the listening room for optimum sound transmission.
Feeling very very cynical these days!
A more earth bound thought is it looks similar to early TENS (Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulator ) machine.
Feeling very very cynical these days!
A more earth bound thought is it looks similar to early TENS (Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulator ) machine.
My grandad used to have one of these,
Rogers Vitalator photo - brianmicky photos at pbase.com
a scary contraption... as you brought the attachments near your hand ozone was created, the tingling was unbelievable, while the glass fittings glowed violet.
Rogers Vitalator photo - brianmicky photos at pbase.com
a scary contraption... as you brought the attachments near your hand ozone was created, the tingling was unbelievable, while the glass fittings glowed violet.
Oh, the Q word, and for once it doesn't stand for Quartz ... I can bring this back around to audio:
And yes - don't tell anyone, but the letters QF stand for Quantum Flapdoodle.
I suppose this is a good a place as any to introduce my first commercial audio product, The QF-1 Turntable, able to resolve groove modulations BELOW the Quantum Limit.
And yes - don't tell anyone, but the letters QF stand for Quantum Flapdoodle.
There's continuity across the reed switch. Brought the little magnet up to it. I can break it reliably from about 1cm. Right there where it ought to be. Good lord why? One guy is in jail for this stuff. You can still find units like it on the net. Did the designers anticipate that and try to give themselves an out... a red herring for the prosecution?
"your honor, it's theraputic efficacy cannot be adequately apprehended. It's wiped out. Overwritten. Mistrial!"
Would there be any point in implementing a dodge like this for the sake of protecting intellectual property (i'm giving the designer that benefit of doubt again just for curiosity's sake)? Anyone ever seen this type of defense on anything legit?
"your honor, it's theraputic efficacy cannot be adequately apprehended. It's wiped out. Overwritten. Mistrial!"
Would there be any point in implementing a dodge like this for the sake of protecting intellectual property (i'm giving the designer that benefit of doubt again just for curiosity's sake)? Anyone ever seen this type of defense on anything legit?
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