Recycling Two XBox One Consoles Into A 10 GB USB Flash Drive

May 28, 2026 by Maya Posch 4 Comments

Amidst the ongoing RAM & storage apocalypses, Mad Max-esque scenes are unsurprisingly developing, with the eMMC recycling project by [Chase Fournier] from a pair of XBox One S (‘XBone’) mainboards being just one more example. These mainboards come equipped with a 5 GB eMMC chip installed, alongside 8 GB of DDR3.

Removing the eMMC chips isn’t that complicated and after some reballing fun the chips were both installed on a carrier board with a Norelsys NS1081 controller IC. This provides a USB 3.0 interface and can connect to up to four SD or eMMC memories, with here just two channels used.

Although the eMMC testing device didn’t seem too happy with either chip, after mounting them on the PCB the controller could be programmed and saw both eMMC packages for a grand total of 10 GB storage.

Sequential read performance in CrystalDiskMark was about 140 MB/s while write performance was about 64 MB/s, which is zippy enough for smaller files. Not that you can store more than 10 GB on this USB drive anyway.

Turning the DDR3 ICs on the mainboard into proper DIMM or SODIMM sticks would also be an idea, as even such older memory tech keeps ramping up in demand. As for the XBone X variant with its 12 of GDDR5, that’s probably a harder proposition to repurpose, but recycling old consoles suddenly has become a lot more exciting.

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Testing LFP Battery Failure Modes With Overcharging

May 28, 2026 by Maya Posch 27 Comments

As great as batteries are, it’s essential to understand their risks and how to keep them from going spicy. Recently there has been a bit of a fuss about the dangers of LiFePO₄ (LFP) batteries after someone’s dedicated LFP battery shed got shredded into matchsticks by a hydrogen explosion, following said LFP batteries having a thermal event. The thing about the LFP chemistry is that if it suffers such a thermal event, it generates hydrogen gas, which is one of the most explosion-happy gases known to man. This is demonstrated in a recent video by [Will Prowse].

To kick things off, a single prismatic LFP cell is overcharged for half an hour after it was already at 100% state of charge. This ultimately pops the vent as the cell begins to release hydrogen gas into the aquarium that the cell was placed in. Using a spark generator it’s then attempted to ignite the gas, which initially takes a bit as enough hydrogen has to collect first.

Once there’s ignition, however, it happily keeps burning as more and more hydrogen pours out of the by now bulging cell’s vent. If any other LFP cells had been nearby these too would be at risk of suffering thermal runaway, showing how just one bad LFP cell is enough to potentially set an LFP battery bank ablaze.

In a commercial setting you will have precautions such as hydrogen sensors, ventilation and spark generators to deal with any generated hydrogen gas, as well as blow-out panels in case things end up going squirrely in a hurry.

While a benefit of LFP chemistry is that it does not generate its own oxygen as with other lithium-ion chemistries, hydrogen gas is a major problem due to how incredibly volatile it is. It’s not just a headache with battery storage, but also in the nuclear power sector, where zirconium fuel rod cladding can very efficiently turn steam into hydrogen and oxygen. This was the reason why some of Fukushima Daiichi’s buildings suffered detonations, with the nuclear plant operator opting to not install recommended hydrogen gas mitigation systems.

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Decoding The Tianwen-2 Sample Return Mission’s Telemetry Signal

May 27, 2026 by Maya Posch No comments

China’s Tianwen-2 asteroid sample return mission launched on 28 May of 2025 and is scheduled to arrive at its target – near-Earth asteroid 469219 Kamo’oalewa – in June 2026. This gives folk back on Earth plenty of time to listen in on the probe’s communication with its home base, such as [Daniel Estévez] who recently had a poke at this telemetry as captured by the Dwingeloo radio telescope in the Netherlands.

With not a lot of public information on its trajectory it’s a hard probe to track, but now that it’s nearing its destination there’s an obvious part of the sky to aim for. This is X-band telemetry, broadcast at 8428.19 MHz, with the same basic modulation as its predecessor Tianwen-1.

Where it differs is in the coding, with Tianwen-2 also using concatenated coding, but having a frame length that’s better suited to submitting full Reed-Solomon codewords and does not require omitting bytes to make things awkwardly fit.

After analyzing the telemetry data itself, there doesn’t seem to be anything exciting contained within this capture. This does seem to be as expected considering that the probe is still in its coast phase where it doesn’t have to do much and likely is in a low-power state most of the time. Once its orbital insertion burn begins is when this knowledge can likely be used to track the mission in fine-grained detail, which is an event that we’re definitely looking forward to.

Linux Distributions And Who Is Responsible For The Software

May 27, 2026 by Maya Posch 48 Comments

The topic of downstream and upstream is an important one in the Linux ecosystem, where from one base distribution you can go many layers of distros deep before even looking at all the other base distributions. Within that veritable jungle you get questions about who is responsible for packaging software, where to report bugs found with a specific application, as well as what ‘LTS’ truly means in a consumer context. These and other points are raised in a recent video by [Brodie Robertson], with many examples of things going tragically wrong.

There’s a good argument to be made that ultimately it is the distro that is responsible for the software that they provide via their repositories. As [Brodie] shows in the video, there are a few cases where an ‘LTS’ distro uses an old version of some software that contains a bug that has been fixed a while ago, so reporting it to the developer is rather pointless, while the distro maintainers should fix it with backporting of patches or updating the version.

From an end user experience this also makes the most sense, as in the end they just want to have the Windows experience of downloading a proverbial installer, clicking through whatever dialogs pop and have working software. If the software is provided via the distro, it is their responsibility, the same way that you contact the developer if you get a DEB or RPM from a GitHub project page and it doesn’t work.

This current Linux Chaos Vortex can be called a major issue when e.g. FreeBSD has no such upstream/downstream issues, with cross-platform installers being basically impossible on Linux ever since the Linux Standard Base effort died.

Perhaps Linux will get a distroless future, however, which may finally herald that Year of the Linux Desktop.

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Autopsy Of A Failed Vintage Carbon Resistor

May 27, 2026 by Maya Posch 5 Comments

Detail of the lead connecting to the inner carbon-filled tube. (Credit: CuriousMarc)

Although resistors are hardly among the most exciting components, they are arguably one of the most important ones, as anyone who has done any amount of circuit design and debugging can attest to. So too with a single carbon resistor in a vintage Metrix oscilloscope that [CuriousMarc] recently repaired. After recapping the board there was still a major issue that got traced down to said resistor. After replacing it with a fresh resistor obviously this meant doing an autopsy to see why the old resistor had failed.

The 20 kOhm-rated resistor looked fine on the outside, with no obvious damage or discoloration, but it measured around 0.843 MOhm. To get to the insides [CuriousMarc] asked his friend [TubeTime] on how to proceed. The answer here was sandpaper and a lot of patience, and thus the experiment to see how much sanding it takes to get to the core of a fairly big resistor commenced.

Ultimately the insides were revealed, and they turned out to be rather interesting, with what looked like a glass tube filled with what would be the carbon-laden material between the two lead terminals. From poking around a bit at these insides it would appear that the failure mode was a degraded contact between these terminals and the carbon material. Considering that this resistor is many decades old and has gone through many thermal cycles and potentially various kinetic events some fractures are probably to be expected.

Perhaps most fascinating is the construction of this carbon resistor that looks to be a step above that of the average carbon resistor that [TubeTime] has taken apart over the years.

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Inside Dyson’s Over-Engineered ₤1000 Hand Dryer

May 27, 2026 by Maya Posch 52 Comments

It seems fair to say that Dyson sits at the intersection of impressive engineering and borderline ridiculous products. The Dyson Airblade 9KJ hand dryer that [ElectrArc240] recently took to bits would definitely seem to fall under the latter, combining an incredible amount of engineering all for the simple task of drying wet hands.

These hand dryers are rated for a cool 900 Watts, with an 0.5 W standby power consumption, though you can also switch it to a 650 W ‘eco mode’ when installing it. The air that gets sucked into the dryer first passes through a HEPA filter before it hits the heating element and then gets blown out of the handles onto one’s hands.

Both of these handles come with a presence sensor in the form of an ST VL53L3CX time-of-flight sensor, along with a path for the heated air towards the thin slits. Returning to the section just past the HEPA filter is the compressor, with a rather fancy airflow path that involves various stacked meshes. As can be seen in the video, where you’d expect basically a simple blower motor or so, there is a truly astounding amount of parts as the teardown progresses.

The motor disassembly is the first part where some desoldering and breaking of glue bonds is really necessary, but it gives full access to the driver board. The circuit used here is your typical IGBT-based driver, though with a mystery PIC MCU to do things. Following this the tear-down turns fully destructive, giving access to the motor internals.

Following an analysis of these internals we marvel at the carbon-fiber rotor that keeps the single magnet in one piece. This is another engineering choice that serves to justify the 1,000 quid price tag. All so that rest room visitors do not have to suffer the humility of using paper towels.

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AMOC And The Planet-Wide Impact Of Ocean Currents

May 27, 2026 by Maya Posch 14 Comments

Although it can be hard to tell from looking at the often placid waters of the Earth’s oceans, their currents carry immense amounts of water around the globe on a daily basis, underlying a dynamic system that – much like the Earth’s atmosphere – plays a major role in everything from weather systems to local climates and ecosystems.

Of all these ocean currents the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is perhaps the most famous, as it is basically the sole reason why Europe has the mild climate that it does today, courtesy of it carrying thermal energy from the equator all the way to the coast off Scandinavia.

Although collapsing an ocean current seems as improbable as stopping the jet streams in the upper atmosphere, it’s actually significantly easier due to how much ocean currents rely on factors that we can fairly easily influence. Over the past decades we have seen worrying signs that the AMOC is indeed weakening, with the million-dollar question being what scenario we’ll be looking at.

While collapsing the AMOC within a decade may be theoretically possible, current models seem to point towards a weakening by about half by the end of this century, with a recent research article by Valentin Portmann et al. in Science Advances going over the various statistical models to come to this conclusion.

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