With companies desperate to keep adding more and more seemingly random features to their products, Oral-B made the logical decision to add Alexa integration to its Oral-B Guide electric toothbrush. Taking it one step beyond just Bluetooth in the toothbrush part, the Guide’s charging base also acted as an Alexa-enabled smart speaker, finally adding the bathroom to the modern, all-connected smart home. Naturally Oral-B killed off the required Oral-B Connect smartphone app earlier this year, leaving Guide owners stranded in the wilderness without any directions. Some of the basics of this shutdown are covered in a recent Ars Technica article.

Amidst the outrage, it’s perhaps good to take a bit more of a nuanced view, as despite various claims, Oral-B did not brick the toothbrush. What owners of this originally USD$230 device are losing is the ability to set up the charging base as an Alexa smart speaker, while the toothbrush is effectively just an Oral-B Genius-series toothbrush with Bluetooth and associated Oral-B app. If you still want to have a waterproof smart speaker listening in while in the bathroom, you’ll have to look elsewhere, it seems. Meanwhile existing customers can contact Oral-B support for assistance, while the lucky few who still have the Connect app installed better hope it doesn’t disconnect, as reconnecting it to the smart speaker seems to be impossible, likely due to services shut down by Oral-B together with the old “oralbconnect.com” domain name.

We recently looked at a WiFi-enabled toothbrush as well, which just shows how far manufacturers of these devices are prepared to go, whether they intend to support it in any meaningful fashion or not.

It never fails. Lay down some kind of superlative — fastest, cheapest, smallest — around this place and someone out there says, “Hold my beer” and gets to work. In this case, it’s another, even simpler audio oscillator, this time with just a loudspeaker and a battery.

Attentive readers will recall the previous title holder was indeed pretty simple, consisting only of the mic and speaker from an old landline telephone handset wired in series with a battery. Seeing this reminded [Hydrogen Time] of a lucky childhood accident while experimenting with a loudspeaker, which he recreates in the video below. The BOM for this one is even smaller than the previous one — just a small speaker and a battery, plus a small scrap of solid hookup wire. The wire is the key; rather than connecting directly to the speaker terminal, it connects to the speaker frame on one end while the other is carefully adjusted to just barely touch the flexible wire penetrating the speaker cone on its way to the voice coil.

When power is applied with the correct polarity, current flows through the wire into the voice coil, which moves the cone and breaks the circuit. The speaker’s diaphragm resets the cone, completing the circuit and repeating the whole process. The loudspeaker makes a little click with each cycle, leading to a very rough-sounding oscillator. [Hydrogen Time] doesn’t put a scope on it, but we suspect the waveform would be a ragged square wave whose frequency depends on the voltage, the spring constant of the diaphragm, and the spacing between the fixed wire and the voice coil lead.

Yes, we realize this is stretching the definition of an audio oscillator somewhat, but you’ve got to admit it’s simple. Can you get it even simpler?