Tooth Tunes Musical Toothbrush Dissection
Transducer in the head of a Toothy Tunes Musical Toothbrush(Click for more photos (photo gallery retired)…)
As mentioned earlier I had hoped to stop on the way home and pick up a Tooth Tunes Musical Toothbrush. Well, I did. For US$8.99 I grabbed a Tooth Tunes which plays Queen’s We Will Rock You. While I can’t stand that song, it was one of the few recognizable songs on the available brushes, with most of the others being tweenpop.
After eating dinner and playing a bit of E4 I decided to dig into the toothbrush. It definitely wasn’t designed to be easily taken apart, with a metal rivet holding the O-ring sealed bottom in place, and the solid plastic pieces ultrasonically welded together. This meant that most of my disassembly was pretty destructive, but I was able to keep all the electronics inside intact and poke around with them a bit.
The only real problem I ran into is that the IC which holds the audio (and can presumably be reprogrammed) is potted, so it’ll be very difficult to get to. The transducer itself is pretty nifty, and pressing it against my teeth or head or the workbench made the audio quite audible. It doesn’t sound too great, but it at least works.
Anyway, if you’d like to see photos which have better descriptions than the little glossed-over stuff above, just take a look here: Tooth Tunes Musical Toothbrush Dissection (photo gallery retired)
And they didn’t put a tongue cleaner on the back either? What a wasted opportunity!
Sometimes it makes you wonder where humanity is heading with this. A disposable object (you are supposed to change your toothbrush every 3-6 months) with electronics going right into landfill, given that people aren’t going to take the thing apart to remove electronic elements. Someone said during the week that we live in a decadent, degenerate civilisation..and I can’t imagine what the aliens doing an archeological expedition to Earth would make of a singing toothbrush!