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Hackaday Links: December 18, 2022

By now everyone has probably seen the devastation wrought by the structural failure of what was once the world’s largest free-standing cylindrical aquarium. The scale of the tank, which until about 5:50 AM Berlin time on Friday graced the lobby of the Raddison Blu hotel, was amazing — 16 meters tall, 12 meters in diameter, holding a million liters of saltwater and some 1,500 tropical fish. The tank sat atop a bar in the hotel lobby and was so big that it even had an elevator passing up through the middle of it.

But for some reason, the tank failed catastrophically, emptying its contents into the hotel lobby and spilling the hapless fish out into the freezing streets of Berlin. No humans were killed by the flood, which is miraculous when you consider the forces that were unleashed here. Given the level of destruction, the displaced hotel guests, and the fact that a €13 million structure just up and failed, we’re pretty sure there will be a thorough analysis of the incident. We’re pretty interested in why structures fail, so we’ll be looking forward to finding out the story here.

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Bottom Of The Barrel Connector: Tell Us Your Socket Hacks

Sometimes you get an epiphany for a project that will change the world. A simple device, on a custom circuit board with inexpensive parts that will disrupt the status quo and make you a billion dollars in no time. Then there are the times where you need to throw scraps of copper at a prototyping board and strangle nine-volts out by any means necessary.

This is about the latter. In one of our Hack Chats, [Morning.Star] shared a couple of images wherein a barrel connector was needed, but there was no time to wait for one in the mail. Necessity birthed the most straightforward solution which did not involve shredding a power adapter’s plug. There is no link, [Stuart Longland] aka [Redhatter] screen-capped the image exchange and reminded us on the tip line.

Chances are you’ve faced this problem yourself. Everyone has a box of old wall warts somewhere, exhibiting a wide range of barrel connector sizes. If you can’t take the easy route of cutting off the connectors, what’s your go-to trick? Alligator clips are a horrid approach, and there aren’t really any clear winners that come to mind. [Morning.Star’s] hack is actually quite respectable! It appears to be a roll of copper (perhaps from tubing?) bent for a bit of spring tension on the outside of the barrel. The inside is contacted by thick copper wire with a kink to again provide spring action.

So, spill the beans. What’s your barrel connector trick and does it work reliably?

Feel Better About Yourself With These Ugly Repairs

A fun thread over at the EEVblog forum starts off with [TerraHertz]’s triangle-peg, square-hole capacitor repair job and goes entertainingly down-hill from there.

Everything from horrifying eBay purchases to work (horror) stories can be found in this thread. But you can learn something too. Did you know the correct way to fix a mercury switch stored in the incorrect orientation is to whack it against a table really hard?

We enjoyed the cigarette box shroud used to fix a graphics card with a defective fan. We’re still not sure about the person who managed to Dremel bits off a graphics card and end up with a working PCI-e card. That one may be a troll.

Regardless, it’s a lot of fun, spanning the hilariously bad and the seriously impressive. We would not be surprised if some of these people met the devil at the crossroads for some soldering skill. Do any of you have an interesting or ugly repair to share? We’d love to see it.