Collaborate Disseminate
“The material value of e-waste alone is worth $62.5 billion, three times more than the annual output of the world’s silver mines and more than the GDP of most countries.” Continue reading The World Economic Forum Tells Davos: Electronics Are ‘the Fastest-Growing Waste Stream in the World’
We all have that friend who brings us their sad busted electronics. In [Leo’s] case, he had a MIDI sequencer from a musician friend. It had a dead display and the manufacturer advised that a driver IC was probably bad, even sending a replacement surface mount part.
[Leo] wasn’t convinced though. He knew that people were always pushing on the switches that were mounted on the board and he speculated that it might just be a bad solder joint. As you can see in the video below, that didn’t prove out.
The next step was to fire up a hot …read more
Hackers tend to face household problems a little differently than ordinary folk. Where the average person sees a painful repair bill or a replacement appliance, the hacker sees a difficult troubleshooting job and the opportunity to save some cash. [trochilidae] was woken one day by the dreaded Clacking Clanking Scraping Sound, or CCSS, and knew that something had to be done.
[trochilidae] reports that usually, the CCSS is due to the child of the house destroying his lodgings, but in this case, the source was laundry based. The Miele tumble dryer was acting up, and in need of some attention. …read more
Continue reading The Mystery of the Clacking Clanking Scraping Sound
If you happened to tune into NASA TV on December 11th, you’d have been treated to a sight perhaps best described as “unprecedented”: Russian cosmonauts roughly cutting away the thermal insulation of a docked Soyuz spacecraft with a knife and makeshift pair of shears. Working in a cloud of material ripped loose during the highly unusual procedure, cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Sergey Prokopyev were effectively carving out their own unique place in space history. Their mission was to investigate the external side of the suspicious hole in the Soyuz MS-09 capsule which caused a loss of air pressure on the …read more
Continue reading A Daring Search for Answers in Soyuz Mystery
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View has two operational IBM 1401 mainframes, which use IBM 1403 high-speed printers. They aren’t some decades-old notion of “high speed” that barely looks sluggish today, either. These monsters slam out ten lines per second thanks to a rotating chain of type slugs and an array of electromagnetic hammers. Every 11.1 microseconds, a character in the chain would be lined up with a hammer, and if the control circuitry identified it as a character that needed to be printed, the hammer behind the paper would drive the paper into the print ribbon and the …read more
Continue reading Vintage IBM 1403 Printer Problem Evades an Easy Fix
The Tektronix 2000 series of oscilloscopes are a mainstay for any electronics lab. They work, they’re relatively cheap, they’re good, and they’re available in just about any surplus electronics store. [Mr.RC-Cam] has been hoarding one of these for twenty years, and like any classic piece of equipment, it needs a little refurbishment every now and again. Now, it’s time. Here’s how you repair one of the best values in analog oscilloscopes.
This repair adventure began when the scope died. There were no lights, no screen trace, and a brief hiss sound when it was powered on. (Ten points if you …read more
Continue reading The Guts Of Switched Mode Power Supplies, Brought To You By Oscilloscope Repair
An Australian hacker has spent thousands of hours hacking the DRM that medical device manufacturers put on CPAP machines to create a free tool that lets patients modify their treatment. Continue reading ‘I’m Possibly Alive Because It Exists:’ Why Sleep Apnea Patients Rely on a CPAP Machine Hacker
The first question you may be asking is, “Why should I be considering third party maintenance over OEM maintenance contracts?” The short answer: MONEY Most buyers who utilize third party maintenance services save up to 50 percent or more ov… Continue reading Become a Budget Hero, Use Third Party Maintenance for IT Assets
“The goal is to intimidate consumers and repair organizations and deceive them into thinking that that a warranty is void if anybody other than Microsoft opens up the box.” Continue reading Microsoft Is Being Sued Over the Xbox One’s Warranty-Void-if-Removed Sticker
You should probably hope you haven’t seen [Techmoan’s] cassette recorder before. That’s because it is a Neal interview recorder that was mainly used by police to tape interrogations. This one was apparently used by the Royal Navy and was sold for parts. Turns out, the repair was simple, but the teardown and the analysis of the machine — you can see it in the video below — is pretty interesting if you’ve never seen one of these before.
The unit looks like a heavy-duty piece of industrial electronics from the 1980s. Unlike a commercial tape deck, this one is made …read more