Link: https://twitter.com/netspooky/status/1796224953739882968
Have you ever wondered what’s in one of those Dyson fans? Mine stopped working and I wanted to get rid of it, but I remembered it has my wifi creds and prolly customer info on the board, so it needs to be properly disposed of.
Let’s take it apart and see what’s inside!
Unscrewing The Base
The first order of business is getting the screws off the bottom. There were screws in several locations, many under the feet. Once the bottom cover is off, you can see the gear mechanism that rotates the fan
Getting The Base Apart
I realized the screws that held the other part of the base were screwed from the inside, so I took out the filter and removed the actual fan part out, revealing the electronics I’m looking for!
Electronics In Fan Base
There are three main things in the base, a screen, a main board, and a wifi/BLE module. The main board is shiny due to resin coating.
Wireless Module
This is a closer pic of the wireless module. When I took this pic, my phone’s camera read that barcode which said “QCA4020”, which is a nice soc I’ve played with before. It’s got WiFi, BLE, and even has 802.15.4 (hehe)
Main Board
This is the main board. It’s glossed tf up with a resin coating. It’s got an STM32F429 which is an ARM Cortex M4 chip. There’s an unmarked chip covered in glue on the back side, which is close to where the power comes in so it’s probably a power controller or something
Air Circulator
Now for the long air circulator part. There is what I assume is an air quality sensor with an air intake. The rest of the unit doesn’t have too much else in it. I know the top of the fan has a magnet for charging the remote, but I dont feel like disassembling.
Twitter user @lukeweston had this to say about the air quality sensor:
Looks like a Sensirion SEN55 or something similar in that family. Laser particulate-matter counting sensor plus temperature, humidity, VOC and NO2 measurement.
The Remote
The remote was very annoying to take apart. It was glued in, so I had to carefully chip away at it with pliers. Notice the magnets on the side of the plastic, and the fact that there are 10 buttons while only 8 are used.
The Fan Blower
I really wanted to get the fan blower apart, but after unscrewing and unclipping everything I could see, the unit seems to be snapped together in a way that I can’t figure out at the moment.
An ex-Dyson engineer said that the part number for the motor is: SHINANO LA034-040NN08A 3-Phase Inner Roto Brushless Motor DC 300V 25W
Final Thoughts
There are people in the quote tweets wondering why this fan even has wifi and stores data. This fan has an MQTT server on it that the app uses to control it. It also stores historical data about air quality, temperature, and other things. That’s why I wanted to take it apart.
For those wondering why I don’t just fix it: The original issue was that the device didn’t boot up. I think a firmware update got borked and bricked it. I spoke with @dnoiz1 who had the same issue. You would need to replace the main board which isn’t an easy part to get.
Also, why do I care about data on the device?
If something collects data about me and it’s in my control, why wouldn’t I take a few minutes to disassemble it and learn about it’s internals? If I could wipe the disk on their servers that had my customer data I would do that too.
While I don’t think that it’s easy to extract anything from this particular device, it’s still fun to take apart and understand what goes into it. Thanks for reading!