Collaborate Disseminate
We know what you’re thinking. It’s a bad power supply, of course it was capacitors to blame. But even if we all intuitively know at this point that bad caps are almost always the culprit when a PSU gives up …read more
Continue reading Chasing Down Bad Caps to Save a Troubled PSU
Sometimes the decision to tackle a project or not can boil down to sourcing parts. Not everything is as close as a Digi-Key or Mouser order, and relying on the availability of surplus parts from eBay or other such markets can be difficult. Knowing if and when a substitute will …read more
Continue reading No Doorknobs Needed for This Nitrogen Laser Build
Fans of retro computers from the 8-bit and 16-bit eras will be well aware of the green death that eats these machines from the inside out. A common cause is leaking electrolytic capacitors, with RTC batteries being an even more vicious scourge when it comes to corrosion that destroys motherboards. …read more
Continue reading Save Your Original Xbox From A Corrosive Death
Anyone who pokes around old electronics knows that age is not kind to capacitors. If you’ve got a gadget with a few decades on the clock, there’s an excellent chance that some of its capacitors are either on the verge of failure or have already given up the ghost. Preemptively …read more
Continue reading Bodge Wire Saves a Vintage Mac SE/30 From the Heap
A few months ago, I fell down the internet rabbit hole known as Ted Munk’s typewriter site. I don’t remember if I just saw this Brother EP43 typewriter for sale and searched for information about them, or went looking for one after reading about them. Either way, the result is …read more
Continue reading Clacker Hacker: Popping a Cap in a Brother EP43 Thermal Typewriter
The ideal component tester is like a tricorder for electronics — it can measure whatever it is that you need it to, all the time. Maybe you have a few devices like an ohmmeter and maybe a transistor socket on our multimeter. But what do you do when you need …read more
Battery technology is the talk of the town right now, as it’s the main bottleneck holding up progress on many facets of renewable energy. There are other technologies available for energy storage, though, and while they might seem like drop-in replacements for batteries they can have some peculiar behaviors. Supercapacitors, …read more
For those of us old enough to experience it first hand, the original Game Boy was pretty incredible, but did have one major downside: battery consumption. In the 90s rechargeable batteries weren’t common, which led to most of us playing our handhelds beside power outlets. Some modern takes on the …read more
You’d think that the 8086 microprocessor, a 40-year-old chip with a mere 29,000 transistors on board that kicked off the 16-bit PC revolution, would have no more tales left to tell. But as [Ken Shirriff] discovered, reverse engineering the chip from die photos reveals some hidden depths.
The focus of …read more
Continue reading Reverse Engineering the Charge Pump of an 8086 Microprocessor
You might think the smell of an electrolytic capacitor boiling out is bad, but if scientists from the University of Sydney have their way, that might be nothing. They’ve devised an ultracapacitor — that uses biomass from the stinky durian fruit along with jackfruit. We assume the capacitors don’t stink …read more
Continue reading Ultracapacitors Might Have Bad Fruity Smell