Divine Pitcher Assembly

In this second part of the Magic Blender disassembly I will be tackling the DPA. The DPA has only one sub-assembly that requires disassembling; that is the Magic Basket (MB).

A saw and pliers made quick work of the MB.

Once opened the contents of the MB spilled out.

I was able to pull out five different kind of magic material from the MB.

There were four different colors of magic beads, and a gravel-like material that looked like bits of shell and coral.

The black beads probably contain ferrous material, as they are attracted to magnets.

The brown and tan bead appear to be some sort of ceramic.

That the MB contains a mixture of materials suggests that each component is designed to impart a special attribute to the magically altered water.  The next step will be dissecting the magical claims, and ascribing sets of them to each of the materials isolated from the MB.  

Magic Base Unit

In this first part of the Magic Blender dissasembly I will be tackling the MBU.  Here is the underside of the MBU:

 There is an interesting secret door:

But there is no magic behind the secret door, just a standard wall-cube type transformer.  It outputs 13 volts AC.  The transformer is rated at 1.5 amps, and so is the MBU:

If I pull the sticker off the MBU display it looks like a circle of green LEDs around a single digit display:

After removing a few screws the MBU easily opens up.  Inside is a circuit board, and a motor unit with a couple of strong magnets attached to it.

It is a single sided curcuit board; there is nothing on the bottom:

Looking at the components on the curcuit board reveals something interesting:

One of the components is a PIC16C54.

The PIC1654 is an interesting programmable 8-bit microcontroller. It is often used for simple LED projects like binary clocks,  electronic dice, or LED-Dial-type clocks.  In this case it undoubtedly runs the Tinkerbell ring, and the countdown timer.

Here is a picture of the Tinkerbell ring display removed, and laid on the DPA-MBU interface ring on the top of the MBU.  You can see that there are no additional logic devices on the ring display board.  You can also get a slightly better view of the hexagonal water image I posted a picture of in the last post.


After careful examination I can safely say that the MBU is simply a magnetic stir plate with a countdown timer and some additional nifty flashing lights.  The circuit is similar to an intermediate-level electronics project available from most retailers of such things.  Aside from the use of a PIC microcontroller this unit is, and does, just what I expected it would.  If there is any magic I expect to find it in the DPA magic basket.

The dissection of the DPA magic basket will have to wait until my next post.

Behold the Blender Magic

In this first part of the dissembling of the magic blender we show that the unit is operational, and describe the major components. 

The unit assembles easily.  While assembling it I remarked that this so foolproof that they must have expected that some uniquely foolish people would be using it.  Here is a video of the unit in operation:

The unit has two major sub-assemblies. The first is the Magic Base Unit (MBU), and the second the Divine Pitcher Assembly (DPA). 

Here is the MBU:

MBU

The MBU features just two controls: an on/off button, and a start/stop button.  In the center of the MBU-DPA interface ring there is a picture adhered to a metallic disk:

MBU-DPA interface ring

This is the image used to depict "Hexagonal Water"'s supposed chemical structure.  The picture on the MBU is probably designed to help convince you of what is magically going on inside the DPA.

The MBU also features a display panel:

MBU display

The numerical display counts down to show you how much time is needed to complete the magic after the Start/Stop button is pressed.  The interesting ring of circles is actually a ring of tiny green lights that light up in a circular pattern.  This is eerily like the tinkerbell effect apparatus I simulated in a gif published earlier in this blog.

The DPA consists of two parts: a plastic pitcher (with a fill to this line marking), and a DPA rotor assembly.

DPA

The DPA rotor in turn consists of two parts: The magnetic rotor, and the magic basket.

DPA rotor

In this close-up you can easily make out that the housing on my magnetic rotor is damaged.  More interesting is the appearance of magic beads in the magic basket.  One of the things we will be doing later is cutting open this basket, and freeing the magic beads.