I purchased a Z718 Electric RC Metal Alloy Frame GYRO 3.5CH RTF
Helicopter. ( description only, no name included ) After discovering the grand kids were playing with the transmitter and broke all the controls/knobs off, I opened the transmitter up to attempt a new build with a little more power. ( was never able to eliminate the drift to the right ) Still not finding any name on anything.
The small PCB has several, let's say, very inexpensive components on it. I noticed a 14 pin DIP IC soldered to the board which had no numbers on it. Too embarrassed to identify your component!? After taking the IC off the board, I found some numbers, just readable, on the bottom. OQ1044 printed over the top of a circle with C04 molded into the bottom side.
I ran these numbers, in several combinations, through Google, Bing and Chrome. NOTHING came up.
I ask again, is this entire toy, built so cheap, that each part maker is too embarrassed to identify anything that belongs to them?
Trying to find the original mfg. is just as impossible. If you look at Amazon, it is made by so and so. If you look at HobbyKing, it's made by such and such co. Each distributor shows a different maker. And that's my rant for the week. Thanks for listening...

 

My suggestion is to take pictures and post them.

 

Agreed. The internet is a good place to post hard won information about shoddy products. I have done it myself on this site.

 

Many IC's have identifier removed to prevent reverse-engineering.
Replacement TX's are pretty cheap.
Max.

 

Unbranded components are not uncommon. For extreme cost sensitive consumer devices it is not uncommon practice.

Printing a part number on each part has a cost above placing an entire lot into a bag and tagging the bag once.

 

some years ago, I was working on video games, the quarter grabber kind, and found several brands with the numbers all sanded off the ic's. more of the anti reverse engineering nonsense. I managed to fix them all, and found that the numbers were still on the bottoms of the chips. also, the game boards they copied had the origional chip numbers on them. back then, there werent as many chips as now, and there were ways to identify input and output pins, letting you cross reference them.

 

I have sanded the numbers off chips, too.

I know most of the people here could reverse engineer that product, but the amateurs can't. I just didn't want my design to be completely easy to hack.