A cardboard box (top left), set of instructions (top right), and a disassembled gaming console (bottom half) are strewn across a light blue tabletop, giving the impression that repair is impending.

Team Repair Breaks Things To Teach People How To Fix Them

July 25, 2026 by Navarre Bartz 11 Comments

Would you buy a broken device, fix it, then return the repaired item? [Team Repair] hopes you will.

Many people would rather repair what they have than have to get a new device and deal with all the annoyances of shopping and getting used to a new item. The problem is, most people don’t have any experience fixing their broken electronics and are intimidated by the process. [Team Repair] has found that helping people through the process the first time is a big confidence boost, especially when they have a test piece to work with.

[Team Repair] started with workshops and now has a “Fixers Club” subscription box for 8-14 year olds where they will send a broken device every three months to fix. After the device is repaired, it gets sent back into Team Repair, or iFixit in the US, to be broken again and sent to the next fixer. For grownups, there is a similar smartphone repair kit, but it’s currently waitlisted. If you’re in the UK, they even have a classroom program if you want to recruit larger groups into your fixer corps.

Curious about other ways to get into repairing your own things? We don’t recommend starting with smart rings, but learning analog repairs like zippers or turning a laptop into a desktop could be good places to start?

Continue reading “Team Repair Breaks Things To Teach People How To Fix Them” →

3D On The Playdate Handheld

July 25, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 13 Comments

The Playdate is a small handheld console with a dedicated fanbase. Among them is [Cristina Ramos], who recently decided to try and push the limits of the hardware by implementing a 3D renderer for the platform.

[Cristina] began by implementing a raycaster. This is a very simple way to do 3D on limited hardware, and this technique was used by some early games like Wolfenstein 3D. However, for [Cristina], it was more a test to get an idea of the performance limitations of the Playdate. After getting her feet wet with that, she stepped up to implementing a renderer that relied on binary space partitioning, which could load map files in the same format used by the classic Quake engine. There was naturally plenty of work to do to handle things like texture mapping and lighting, too, particularly given the vagaries of working with the Playdate’s 1-bit monochrome screen. Using a simplistic, cel-shaded like approach for textures gave things a good look while preserving visual readability on the low-resolution screen.

The 3D engine and associated game remain a work in progress for [Cristina] — we look forward to seeing where the project goes next. We’ve seen similar projects on resource-limited platforms before, too.

Continue reading “3D On The Playdate Handheld” →

Add Sensors To Everything!

July 25, 2026 by Elliot Williams 23 Comments

“You can’t control what you can’t measure” goes the old chestnut. But that’s a little bit negative, in my opinion. Instead, think of the benefits of sprinkling sensors around everywhere: you gain insight where you simply didn’t have it beforehand.

We were thinking about this in the context of the recent video on pressure advance in 3D printers. Essentially, the unmelted filament acts as a springy piston, and that springiness means that the pressure built up in the melted plastic lags the feedrate of new filament. We usually calibrate this out with a guesstimate constant, but it can be different for every different filament. Measuring that pressure directly with a strain gauge in the hot end makes more sense.

But then there are knock-on benefits of having a sensor in the hot end. You can use the strain gauge as Prusa does to run the nozzle gently into the bed and set the z-axis height. Or you can use over-pressure as a sign that the nozzle is clogged. It’s quite possible that you can use it to signal other things that can go wrong as well, but you can’t tell until you put the sensor on in the first place.

Of course, you don’t want to put a pressure sensor where you want to know the temperature, or vice-versa. But as a general rule, the more you can measure, the more you can discover about the way your system is running. How many strain gauges are too many?

Repairing A RED Cinema Camera On The Cheap

July 25, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 10 Comments

[ALT CINE] took a punt recently when purchasing a damaged RED Komodo camera online. In functional form, the 6K-capable camera sells for several thousand pounds (or dollars, or euros), whether used or brand new. However, [ALT CINE] was able to score the damaged unit for just £700. The question was—could it be repaired and turned back into a functional camera?

Things looked promising from the drop. The camera had just 3 hours of usage recorded in the firmware, and the casing seemed to suggest it had little use. However, the problem was soon revealed to be serious as the image sensor itself appeared to be damaged. Some research provided hope though—that the damage could be limited to a glass layer in front of the sensor itself that had delaminated.

Thankfully, disassembling the camera was easy enough thanks to its modular design, and [ALT CINE] soon had the sensor block on the bench for further examination. The cause of the issue was apparent—overzealous cleaning leading to fluid getting stuck to the rear of the filter in front of the sensor. Simply popping off the filter, cleaning and drying it properly, and reassembling, was enough to get the camera back to fully operational status.

RED’s repair service quoted $695 for a glass filter swap and $1,395 for a full sensor change. In contrast, [ALT CINE] was able to demonstrate that this repair was something easily within the realm of an intermediate camera tinkerer and it cost almost nothing to achieve. The video also covers an alternative potential repair route, wherein a DSMC2 filter can be subbed into a Komodo camera if the damage to the filter glass is otherwise unrecoverable.

It’s rare to get this lucky when it comes to repairing big-dollar cinema cameras like this one. We’ve featured some other great deep-dive camera repairs before, too. Continue reading “Repairing A RED Cinema Camera On The Cheap” →

A baby blue hatchback with red accents drives down a road with blurry trees and a blue sky in the background.

ICCU Monitor Logs Data In E-GMP EV Failures

July 25, 2026 by Navarre Bartz 19 Comments

EVs are less mechanically complicated than their combustion kin, but that doesn’t mean they’re immune to component failure. The Integrated Charge Control Unit (ICCU) has been the main failure point in recent Hyundai/Kia EVs, and ICCU Observer is an attempt to log data from the systems to find the culprit.

The ICCU handles all charging and voltage conversion duties from 800 V down to 12 V in the E-GMP platform EVs from Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis. The main failure mode appears to be when the circuit charging the 12 V fails, eventually rendering the vehicle inoperable. While the rate of failure is relatively low, the exact numbers are unknown, and Hyundai has remained quiet on if they know what’s causing it.

Unsurprisingly, speculation is rampant with owners experiencing failures relaying similarities and differences to others with the same problem. In an effort to bring actual data to the process, [broadwall] has started working on an open data set of information collected over the vehicle’s OBD II port in an effort to pinpoint similarities between the vehicles that have experienced failures.

Hyundai is currently replacing the failed units under warranty (recently expanded to 15 years in most markets), but that’s little comfort when you’re sitting on the side of the road waiting for a tow. These failures stand out in an otherwise easy to maintain platform, so hopefully this effort will lead to a permanent fix instead of merely swapping out for a new unit.

If you’d like to explore data analysis a little further, how about using astrophotography to detect exoplanets or learning more from Stanford?

3D Printed Go Kart Designed To Fit In A Suitcase

July 24, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 7 Comments

[Ivan Miranda] is famous for his large-scale 3D printed vehicles. They’re pretty fun, but they’re also pretty big and heavy—which can make transporting them around rather impractical. Hence, when he had reason to travel with a 3D printed go kart, he went back to the drawing board to create something light enough to pack in regular plane luggage.

The build started with some major compromises compared to [Ivan]’s previous go kart build. Notably, there are only three wheels instead of four, and a simplified control layout that eschews a regular steering wheel. These decisions were made to save weight and allow the design to be more compact. The kart uses a set of handles either side of the rider to handle steering. Drive is via a brushless motor, with power supplied from a series of 18 V drill batteries. Parts were produced on [Ivan]’s massive printer which comes in handy on large-scale projects like these.

All in all, the final build weighed around 20 kg. That’s light enough to be broken down across checked luggage and carry-on for a typical flight. We’d consider the project a success on that basis, even if quite a bit of assembly was required upon arriving at the destination. [Ivan]’s other builds in this realm are pretty fun too, from the printed scooter to the ride-on tank.

Continue reading “3D Printed Go Kart Designed To Fit In A Suitcase” →

Fast Volumetric Imaging Of Seizures With Adaptive Optics Light Sheet Microscopy

July 24, 2026 by Maya Posch No comments

Seizure in zebrafish larva imaged using AO setup. (Credit: Bingxi Liu et al., Biomedical Optics Express, 2026)

Key to understanding something like epilepsy is to be able to record highly transient events in biological tissues. Generally this is done using light sheet microscopy, which provides effectively a 2D ‘slice’ of the tissue in question, but to observe a brief event in a larger biological system you need to be able to rapidly change the layer and focus between the virtual layers. This is what [Bingxi Liu] et al. al did using adaptive optics with an electrically tunable lens (ETL) in order to capture seizures in the brain of zebrafishes.

Their system can capture a volume of 499 × 499 × 150 μm³ at 4 volumes per second, which is large enough to fit optically transparent zebrafish larva into. The optical setup is shown in the above image, with the design based on the OpenSPIM platform for selective plane illumination microscopy.

Here the 488 nm laser provides the illumination (excitation) of the layer, while the 543 nm laser is for calibration purposes. The ETL is thus in the imaging path that allows for capturing by a digital camera, while a beam splitter directs part of the captured data to a Shack-Hartmann wave front sensor (SHWFS), which is part of the adaptive optics system.

After a seizure was induced in the zebrafish larva using the drug pentylenetetrazol the results were recorded using this system. It showed the seizure’s origin in the posterior brain, with subsequent propagation to the anterior before subsiding gradually over tens of seconds.

This system should be quite useful even outside of seizure research, as there are a lot of 3D systems in biology where having a relatively high-speed microscopic capture can be very revealing.