Interesting View Of A Equinox Coil

[Desert Dawg]

Someone has X-rayed a equinox coil. Pretty good sized circuit board inside!

https://md-hunter.com/minelab-equinox-coil-x-ray-is-it-really-the-half-of-machine/

[GB_Amateur]

Interesting response by a commentator (seen at end of blog):

E.T. on June 3, 2018 at 11:01

There is no uPC inside the coil and it means that there are no
“protection codes”! 6 month for R&D and 6 month to start “production”
so in spring 2019 we will have a great choice of coils from MarsMD,
NEL, MGC Lab and so on! Thanks to great variety of coils Equinox
will be extremely popular metal detector!

I would have thought just the opposite.

[Sinclair]

Protection codes can be stored on eeproms, too - no need for a micro controller. Even if there are no protection codes, they could be used to identify the coil type. I had no time to follow all traces, but imho there is the possibility for eeproms to exist on that board (some sort of SOTxxx-6 package for example).

[dewcon4414]

BUT........ wouldnt it be great if he was correct?   Hes right .....  more detector specific coils would really increase the popularity of this machine.    Machines like the Sov were very popular....... lot of it had to do with the coils available.   Not only that ...... prices would be competitive. 

[Sinclair]

Who wants increased popularity for our secret weapon?

 

My answer came from the following point of view:

I don't understand how someone claims there is no protection, because he saw some X-Ray pictures .. - In my opinion such conclusion isn't possible at this stage... anyway... perhaps Minelab even gave 3rd party suppliers  the information they need to produce coils for the nox and there's no need for reverse-engineering or overwhelming R&D .. who knows

 

[LowTide]

Sorry to rain on any parades but there are clearly IC's on the Printed Circuit Board.  They are called Chip on Board, or COB for short.  If you look at the third and fourth photos up from the Facebook link you can see some thin lines which are called bonding wires.  In high production items you can save money by etching the integrated circuit onto the the circuit board and then covering it with a black blob of epoxy.  This cuts cost and makes it more difficult to reverse engineer since you can't just de-solder a package.

 

[Sinclair]

Nah... no COB.. what you see there is the inside of standard surface mount components (die).. nevertheless: There are ICs on the board, there's no argue about that

 

by the way..  you cannot etch an ic directly to a standard circuit board, what you mean are directly to the circuit board mounted dies. Essentially that are ics without housing covered by that famous black blob...    Otherwise you wouldn't need bonding wires, wouldn't you