Inside A Hisense TV Repair Attempt

April 6, 2024 by Al Williams 18 Comments

Many of us misspent our youth fixing televisions. But fixing a 1970s TV is a lot different than today — the parts were big and tubes were made to be replaced. Have you torn into a big flat screen lately? It is a different world, as [The Fixologist] shows us in the video below.

The TV in question was rescued from a neighbor who was about to throw it away. If you are like us, you’ll watch the first few minutes and see it powers up, but the screen is very dark. Back light problem, right? No problem. But it turned out to be more than we thought.

Honestly, we assumed it might be the power supply, and we would have put a power supply on the LED leads to test that first. That would have been smart because taking the panel off to reveal the LEDs was very difficult! There were two bad LEDs, though, so in the end you’d have had to do it anyway.

We were disappointed that after fixing the LED, he cracked the LCD panel during the reinstallation. So, in the end, this was more of a teardown video and not a repair video. He seemed to think a lot of the tape in the unit was to thwart repairs. That could be, but we wondered if it made manufacturing the TV easier which, after all, is mostly what they care about.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard people tearing into a TV and wondering if the factory was against them. We’ve considered it, but we are pretty sure it isn’t the case.

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Recovering A Physically Broken SD Card

April 3, 2024 by Jenny List 12 Comments

There is much to be found online about recovering data from corrupt SD cards, but [StezStix Mix] had an entirely different problem with his card. He’d filmed an important video to it, then dropped it and ran his office chair over it, snapping it almost in half. He’s put up a couple of videos showing how he recovered the data, and we’ve put them below the break.

A modern SD card is mostly just plastic, as in the decades since the format was created, the size of the circuitry on it has decreased dramatically. So his stroke of luck was that the card circuitry was a tiny PCB little bigger than the contact pad area on a full size SD card. There was a problem though, it wouldn’t be easy to fit in an SD card socket. So in the first video he goes through physically wiring it to a USB card reader, which results in reading the data after a false start in remembering that an SD card activates a switch.

This however is not the end of the story, because he had viewers asking why he didn’t simply attach an SD card shaped bit of cardboard. So the second video below goes through this, trying both card, and an SD to micro SD adapter. We find that making something to fit an SD socket is a lot less easy than it looks, but eventually he manages it.

Meanwhile those of you with long memories may recall this isn’t the first SD surgery we’ve brought you.

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You Should Be Allowed To Fix McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines, Say Federal Regulators

March 20, 2024 by Lewin Day 23 Comments

Editors Note: According to our infallible record keeping, this is the 50,000th post published on Hackaday! We weren’t sure this was the kind of milestone that required any drawn out navel-gazing on our part, but it does seem significant enough to point out. We didn’t pick any specific post to go out in this slot, but the fact that it ended up being a story about the right to repair ice cream machines seems suitably hacky for the occasion.

The McDonald’s ice cream machine is one of the great marvels of the modern world. It’s a key part of our heavily-mechanized industrial economy, and it’s also known for breaking down as often as an old Italian automobile. It’s apparently illegal to repair the machines unless you’re doing so with the authority of Taylor, the manufacturer. However, as reported by The Verge, The FTC and DOJ may soon have something to say about that.

Things are coming to a head as the Copyright Office contemplates whether to carve out new exemptions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The legislation is widely reviled by many for making it illegal to circumvent copy protection, an act that is often required to maintain or repair certain equipment. As a result customers are often locked into paying the original manufacturer to fix things for them.

Both the FTC and DOJ have have filed a comment with the Copyright Office on the matter. The language will warm the cockles of your heart if you’re backing the right-to-repair movement.

Changes in technology and the more prevalent use of software have created fresh opportunities for manufacturers to limit Americans’ ability to repair their own products. Manufacturers of software-enabled devices and vehicles frequently use a range of restrictive practices to cut off the ability to do a “DIY” or third-party repair, such as limiting the availability of parts and tools, imposing software “locks,” such as TPMs, on equipment that prevent thirdparty repairers from accessing the product, imposing restrictions on warranties, and using product designs that make independent repairs less available.

The agencies want new exceptions to Section 1201 of the DMCA to allow repair of “industrial and commercial equipment.” That would make it legal to tinker with McDonald’s ice cream machines, whoever you are. The hope is this would occur along with a renewal of exceptions for “computer programs that control devices designed primarily for use by consumers and computer programs that control motorized land vehicles, marine vessels, and mechanized agricultural vehicles.”

Brush up on the finer details of icecreamgate in our previous coverage. This could be a grand time for change. Enough is enough— McDonald’s ice cream machines have been down for too long! Video after the break.

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Repairing A Gear With A Candle (and Some Epoxy)

March 19, 2024 by Al Williams 19 Comments

You have a broken gear you need to fix, but there’s no equivalent part available. That’s the issue [Well Done Tips] faced with a plastic gear from a lawnmower. While we’d be tempted to scan the gear, repair the damage in CAD and then 3D print a new one, we enjoyed hearing about his low-tech solution. In addition to the write up, there’s a video showing the process you can watch below.

The idea is pretty simple. Using a piece of pipe and melted candle wax, he prepared a mold of an undamaged section of the gear. Then he cast epoxy resin in place to recreate the missing pieces. There are a few tricks, like putting holes in the remaining part of the gear so the epoxy flows into the existing part. Depending on the gear’s purpose and original material, you might be able to just use it as-is. However, you could also use the repaired gear as a template to create another mold and then cast an entire gear from resin or even metal if you can cast metal.

You can argue whether resin is better or worse than PLA, but of course, it depends on the kind of resin—photopolymers are different from epoxy resins you’d use for this sort of thing. If you think you might like to make your new gear out of aluminum, you might find some inspiration in a previous post.

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A new display wedged into a car-based fridge

New Brains Save 12 V Fridge From The Scrap Heap

March 14, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 17 Comments

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

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

March 2, 2024 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

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

February 28, 2024 by Arya Voronova 29 Comments

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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