A new display wedged into a car-based fridge

New Brains Save 12 V Fridge From The Scrap Heap

Recently [nibbler]’s Evakool 55L vehicle fridge started to act strangely, reporting crazy temperature errors and had no chance of regulating. The determination was that the NTC thermistor was toast, and rather than trying to extricate and replace this part, it was a lot easier to add a new one at a suitable location

Bog-standard fridge internals

A straight swap would have been boring, so this was a perfect excuse for an overboard hack. Reverse engineering the controller wouldn’t be easy, as the data wasn’t available, as is often the case for many products of this nature.

While doing a brain transplant, the hacker way, we can go overboard and add the basics of an IoT control and monitoring system. To that end, [nibbler] learned as much as possible about the off-the-shelf ZH25G compressor and the associated compressor control board. The aim was to junk the original user interface/control board and replace that with a Raspberry Pi Pico W running CircuitPython.

For the display, they used one of the ubiquitous SH1106 monochrome OLED units that can be had for less than the cost of a McDonald’s cheeseburger at the usual purveyors of cheap Chinese electronics.  A brief distraction was trying to use a DS18B20 waterproof thermometer probe, which they discovered didn’t function, so they reverted to tried and trusted tech — a simple NTC thermistor.

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Cybiko Repair-A-Thon With Memory Upgrade

Concluding a four-part repair-a-thon on a stack of Cybiko handheld computers, [Robert] over at Robert’s Retro covered the intricate details of fixing a last batch of four in a nearly one-hour long video. These devices, with their colorful transparent cases, are a great time capsule of the early 2000s. Even with their limited hardware, they provided PDA-like capabilities to teens years before smartphones were a thing, with features including music playback and wireless chat (albeit limited to recipients within 100 meters).

Of the four units covered in this video, they are all the original Cybiko Classic, with two each of the first and second revision, none of which were booting due to a bad Flash chip. Another issue was the dead rumble motors on them, which fortunately are the easiest to replace. One of the units also has a dead display, which did not get replaced this time around.

Insides of a Cybiko Classic (Credit: Robert's Retro, YouTube)
Insides of a Cybiko Classic (Credit: Robert’s Retro, YouTube)

The flash chip replacement was a bit more of a headache, as these devices don’t just take any chip, mostly due to how much the system relies on the ready-busy line. This led [Robert] to replace the old 4 Mb AT45DB041 chips with  the 16 Mb Atmel AT45DB161. Previously he had taken 1 MB chips from an expansion cartridge to replace more dead flash chips, so those were replaced with 2 MB chips.

With fresh flash in place, the next challenge was to get these written with a firmware image, with the v2 Cybiko units already having CyOS on the separate 256 kB Flash chip, but the v1 units relying on the single big Flash chip for all storage. Fortunately, an enterprising member of the community developed a tool to ease this ordeal by allowing a Cybiko unit in its serial dock to be flashed with no issues, other than the 2 MB Flash causing some issues as this was a previously unknown hardware configuration.

[Robert] now has four working Cybiko units, with one being headless due to the busted screen, and more room for apps on the 2 MB units than a 2000s teenager would have known what to do with.

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Pictures of the internals of the Starlink adapter

Restoring Starlink’s Missing Ethernet Ports

Internet connectivity in remote areas can be a challenge, but recently SpaceX’s Starlink has emerged as a viable solution for many spots on the globe — including the Ukrainian frontlines. Unfortunately, in 2021 Starlink released a new version of their hardware, cost-optimized to the point of losing some nice features such as the built-in Ethernet RJ45 (8P8C) port, and their proposed workaround has some fundamental problems to it. [Oleg Kutkov], known for fixing Starlink terminals in wartime conditions, has released three posts on investigating those problems and, in the end, bringing the RJ45 ports back.

Starlink now uses an SPX connector with a proprietary pinout that carries two Ethernet connections at once: one to the Dishy uplink, and another one for LAN, with only the Dishy uplink being used by default. If you want LAN Ethernet connectivity, they’d like you to buy an adapter that plugs in the middle of the Dishy-router connection. Not only is the adapter requirement a bother, especially in a country where shipping is impeded, the SPX connector is also seriously fragile and prone to a few disastrous failure modes, from moisture sensitivity to straight up bad factory soldering.

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Apple Pushes Back On Right To Repair Bill Due To Parts Pairing

After previously supporting one in California, Apple has made an about-face and is now pushing back against a “Right to Repair” bill (Senate Bill 1596) currently under consideration in Oregon. The reason for this appears to be due to this new bill making parts pairing illegal, as reported by [404media] and [PCMag].

The practice of parts pairing is becoming ever more prevalent with Apple devices, which links specific parts of a system such as cameras, displays, batteries, and fingerprint sensors to the mainboard. During the open hearing on the newly proposed Oregonian bill, Apple’s [John Perry] insisted that this parts pairing is done for user security, safety and privacy.

Even in we take that claim at face value, the fact remains that with parts pairing in place, only authorized Apple repair centers can routinely replace components — while user repairs are limited to specific devices with limited part availability. Even in the latter case the user still has to contact Apple to have them reauthorize the replaced part. This is becoming an issue with Apple’s MacBooks as well, where the lid angle sensor requires calibration using a proprietary tool.

During the same hearing, the director of an Oregon nonprofit organization noted that of the 15,000 iPhones which they had donated to them last year, only 300 could be refurbished due to parts pairing. The remainder of otherwise perfectly fine phones are discarded for recycling, which is terrible for everyone but Apple. Whether the parts pairing element of the bill survives it to the final form remains to be seen, but if it passes it’d set the trend for future bills in other states as well as amendments to existing ones.

Thanks to [paulvdh] for the tip.

Recovering A Busted Video Capture Device With Firmware Flashing Tricks

Sometimes, you have a piece of hardware that just up and stops working on you. In today’s fast-paced world, it’s easy to toss something broken and move on. [BuyItFixIt], as you imagine, makes it their purpose to, well, fix things instead. Their latest efforts involved resurrecting a dead AVerMedia Live Gamer 2 Plus capture device sourced off eBay.

The device was advertised as being dead, with no power. Probing around the board when powered up showed that there was some basic activity going on with one of the flash chips, but the device simply wouldn’t spring to life. This suggested that perhaps the flash had become corrupted, which was confirmed when reading the chip mostly returned 0xFF. Sadly, the device was so badly bricked that the usual update methods via SD card simply wouldn’t work.

Eventually, hunting down a debug header provided a way in. [BuyItFixIt] was able to find a way to flash firmware over this connection instead, but there was a problem. The firmware they had was formatted for loading via SD card, and wouldn’t work for the debug mode entry route. Instead, getting the device going would require recovering firmware from a similar working device, and then using that as a guide to assemble a proper workable firmware update to get the device back to an operational state.

It’s a great tale of perseverance and triumph, particularly given many would give up after the first update attempt failed. We’ve seen [BuyItFixIt] pull off some heroic repairs before, too. Video after the break.

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Fixing A Tractor Dashboard From Over 10,000 Miles Away

[BuyItFixIt] is well known as a dab hand at, well, fixing things… and presumably buying them, too. Recently, they received an email calling for help of the former kind. One of their Australian viewers owned the same model of tractor, but with a dead digital dash. Thankfully, help was at hand!

The problem turned out to be due to a dead EEPROM on the Australian tractor. In contrast, [BuyItFixIt] had a perfectly working dashboard on their tractor. Thus, they set about disassembling the dash and dumping the EEPROM to try and sort the stricken farm implement. This posed some risk of ending up with two dead dashboards, necessitating a careful hand. In any case, the Case tractor had a fairly simple dash with a majority of through-hole components, making it fairly easy to work with. The Microchip 93LC46B chip was in a DIP package, and was removed with the aid of some low-melting point solder in short order. The contents of the EEPROM were then dumped to a file using a XGecu T48 programmer.

With the file sent off via email, the Australian tractor owner flashed a fresh EEPROM and reinstalled it in their cluster. They were greeted with success, with the only complication being that the hours reading on the cluster had to be corrected to match the previous reading on their machine.

It’s a fairly simple story of fixing an embedded system, but it’s an educational one. It also comes with a deeper dive into how the CASE dashboard works. Just about anyone with basic electronic skills could pull this off and save an entire tractor in the process. It’s great to see these jobs documented so that we can all learn useful basic skills like these. Video after the break.

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Fixing A Malfunctioning Keithley Model 179 Digital Multimeter

Inspired by electronics repair videos on YouTube, [Steven Leibson] recently found himself hunting down something to fix on eBay. This ‘something’ ended up being a  certified classic: a Keithley Model 179 digital multimeter from 1978. Listed as non-functional, the unit arrived at his door for less than $50. There weren’t any exciting pops or smoke when he powered it on, but the display seemed to be showing nothing but random nonsense.

The Keithley Model 179 multimeter has a convenient calibration sequence printed on its electrostatic shield cover and a deadly exposed ac line fuse in the upper left part of the photo. (Image credit: Steven Leibson)
The meter has a convenient calibration sequence printed on its electrostatic shield cover and a deadly exposed AC line fuse in the upper left part of the photo.

Ultimately reviving this little piece of history was quite simple, with the main issue turning out to be a dodgy inter-board connector between the main and display boards. After admiring an old repair attempt made on the component, he removed both the male and female connectors, replacing them with new ones.

This uncovered issues with the PCB, as the FR4 material and the traces on it had begun to delaminate, probably due to the old adhesive giving up due to age. With pretty low trace density this wasn’t anything that a bit of care couldn’t work around, fortunately.

Before finding this dodgy connector, [Steven] first tried to clean the front mechanical connectors, which took multiple sessions. This was followed up by oiling the mechanism. With the connector fixed and some cleaning, the meter’s display now read correctly. It still has some issues with starting up though, which [Steven] reckons are due to the old capacitors in the device.

Presumably some recapping will round off this fun device revival experience, but for the time being a Keithley Model 179 has been saved from e-waste, to inspire generations to come.