I tried finding Hidden Gems on AliExpress & got NASA Technology?!

Would you believe that this product here, which only costs about €4, comes with NASA

technology

? Well, I couldn't and that's why there is this series of videos where I take interesting or strange looking products from AliExpress and test them properly to finally tell you whether you should review them or stay away from them. And today I have 6 more intriguing looking products to try. So let's not waste any more time and get started! This video is sponsored by Displate and it is a curious fact; I had their metal signs hanging in my house before they offered to sponsor this video.

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Now let's start with NASA's

technology

product and without testing anything; I would no longer recommend it. The reason is that it is advertised as an antifreeze instrument to remove snow from your car, which initially sounded and seemed very interesting. But then I read the description and realized they were using scientific nonsense language; Speaking of which electromagnetic energy in the composite frequency band can effectively affect ice and snow;....sure. And of course, it does all that without batteries, just solar power. So I was very skeptical once the product arrived and immediately noticed that they changed the original packaging shown here for this one, revealing that it's just an air freshener for your car.

So yes; As an air freshener it works and the solar panel on top actually powers a small motor inside that spins this contraption to probably diffuse the smell better. But needless to say, I really despise this misleading product description. That being said, let's move on to a product that we hope will be useful; with this Mini GPS locator that you can get for about €9. Now, unfortunately, the production description doesn't tell you exactly how to use it; but fortunately a small manual was included that answered practically all the questions. So to use this, I first stole a working SIM card from my home security system, disabled PIN activation, and then connected it to the tracker.

The flashing red LED now means that this has turned on successfully and only at this point, by the way, can you charge it. But anyway; To communicate with it you simply have to send an SMS with a specific series of numbers like 000 to link it with the GPS tracker or 777 to get the GPS location which indoors was not entirely accurate with deviations of around 3 km. And by coming out with this, the accuracy would be expected to improve; but not; GPS position still totally inaccurate. I only got this accuracy to improve by turning on live tracking, where trackers give you a username and password for a Chinese website where you can then see the tracker's position updated every 10 seconds.

Accuracy here never exceeded 500m and needless to say, this mode was also a bit scary. But it gets even worse when you realize that you can call this thing and then listen to the sounds around it to basically spy on people, which in my testing actually worked. And if active listening isn't your thing, then you can also insert a Micro SD card to save sound recordings there, which also worked well in my test. So yeah, this seems more like a spy bug than a GPS tracker whose accuracy is probably so bad because of this little GPS antenna.

Combine that with the fact that this circuit requires quite a bit of current from its small internal battery; which means it won't last long and I must sum up that I feel there are more negatives than positives. But if you still decide to buy one, don't use it to spy on people; thank you. And that brings us to the next product which is this UV resin glue with combined UV light that you can get for about €7. And I know that glue is not the most exciting topic; but believe me when I say that when it comes to building things;

You use glue more often than you think. In my case, I always use hot glue for weaker joints that I can then use quite quickly and this 2-component adhesive when I need really strong joints; but that one takes a full day to dry. I hope that with this UV glue I can achieve a better balance between bond strength and drying time. So, for a first test, I simply inserted a battery into the included UV lamp, poured some glue on a piece of paper, and shined the light on it. And very quickly, within a minute, this material completely hardened;

Very good start, I would say. But after using it on a suitable 3D printed part, I started to realize that the bond strength might not be what I was looking for. So for a more scientific test, I next 3D printed some test pieces with PETG and PLA filament, used my 3 different glues to connect them, and then repeated this process for some wood and metal test pieces as well. As soon as all the glues were dry; I clamped the pieces to my workbench one after the other and pulled on the other side with a hanging scale to see where the glue bond breaks.

And I have to say that I couldn't break the two-component adhesive since I couldn't apply more than 30 kg of force. Except the metal test piece which required around 10kg. But still a good result considering the hot glue joint broke at around 1kg. Other than that, the hot glue also worked surprisingly well as I couldn't separate any of the other test pieces. And that means only the UV resin glue was left and boy, this stuff performed terribly in comparison; Here is the final graph. One reason is that the UV glue did not dry properly on the inside since apparently no UV light reached it.

That means for me that I won't be using UV glue in the future. And that brings me to the fourth product that is hopefully good and that is this 5.5-inch OLED screen that you can get for €78, which is quite expensive. But wait a minute; In the last AliExpress video I also featured a DIY screen kit that was not only cheaper; but also bigger. And yes, this larger one also offers good quality; but this little guy supposedly comes with OLED technology and a touch screen. That would make it perfect for a Raspberry Pi project I've had in mind for some time.

So to test it, I first plugged it into my laptop and, good news, the touchscreen worked right away, but the screen orientation was wrong. To fix this, unfortunately you can't use the buttons on the controller board. Instead, you have to adjust the output settings of your video source, which was pretty easy to do. At this point I realized how much better the video quality of this little screen was compared to my laptop and the reason is that this screen actually uses OLED technology. And another thing I loved was that this screen only requires about 300 mA at 5 V.

But on the other hand there were also some disadvantages, like the screen is very thin and therefore delicate, the touch screen apparently does not work on the top and bottom border and this doesn't work out of the box with a Raspberry Pi as a video source. Now I bet there are settings we can adjust in the Raspberry Pi OS to make this display work; but for now it's kind of a mix that I would ultimately still recommend. And if you're looking for other screen sizes (like me), definitely check out my screen seller, who offers a large and interesting variety.

Ok and now that I found something good; Let's move on to something a little more dubious with these two different types of signal boosters that you can get for about 2 or 3 euros. According to their product descriptions, simply place them on the back of your phone and badabom badabeng will have better reception. They even say it's like having a 4 foot antenna connected to your phone that would look like this: What the hell? But who knows, maybe it works because sometimes placing a resonance circuit near an oscillator can improve power transmission or maybe reception. So I tested my 4G upload and download speed and checked my phone's signal strength before connecting the two signal boosters right above the two antennas inside my phone.

And to my surprise, the signal strength improved a little; but after doing many upload and download speed tests once again, the average was more or less the same as before. I even checked with my little spectrum analyzer what the signal strength was for the frequencies primarily used and once again there was no noticeable difference with or without the signal boosters. So based on my test results, I can't really recommend them. And that brings us to the last product, which is this portable digital oscilloscope that you can get for about €20. Now in case you don't know; An oscilloscope is a very useful tool when it comes to creating electronic circuits;

The only problem is that they are not really cheap. But with this mini version here there is no price excuse for not having an oscilloscope and by the way I got the cheapest version without battery or probes. To test it, I first connected it to my function generator and I must say it worked pretty well. I mean, the display is clear, the auto function works very well, you can adjust practically all the important parameters and the measurement function also works well, except sometimes the frequency measurement. The only thing that was a little cumbersome was scrolling through all the parameters with a single button and that the smallest time value per division is 10us.

That means that frequencies above 200 kHz cannot be inspected well with this scope; but hey, that's still enough for many beginner projects. So next I wanted to test individual measurements, meaning the oscilloscope only triggers once at a specific voltage value that the handheld oscilloscope had a bit of difficulty with; but in the end it somehow worked. So overall, the only big downside to the mini oscilloscope is that a probe input can be a bit limiting. Of course, you also won't have access to advanced measurement features, FFT, decoding, and a bit more. But let's be honest, for €20 you still get an amazing beginner oscilloscope that you can use without worries to learn the basics of working with an oscilloscope.

And since I really like the form factor and the quality of the hardware; This one definitely gets a thumbs up from me. And so, we successfully covered 6 most interesting products from AliExpress that, for the first time, I think got more downvotes than upvotes from me. But I hope you were still entertained and maybe found a

hidden

gem for yourself. If so, don't forget to like, share, subscribe and hit the notification bell. Stay creative and see you next time.