Inside A Compact Intel 3000 W Water-Cooled Power Supply

February 22, 2026 by Maya Posch 10 Comments

Recently [ElecrArc240] got his paws on an Intel-branded 3 kW power supply that apparently had been designed as a reference PSU for servers. At 3 kW in such a compact package air cooling would be rather challenging, so it has a big water block sandwiched between the two beefy PCBs. In the full teardown and analysis video of the PSU we can see the many design decisions made to optimize efficiency and minimize losses to hit its 80 Plus Platinum rating.

For the power input you’d obviously need to provide it with 240 VAC at sufficient amps, which get converted into 12 VDC at a maximum of 250 A. This also highlights why 48 VDC is becoming more common in server applications, as the same amount of power would take only 62.5 A at that higher voltage.

The reverse-engineered schematic shows it using an interleaved totem-pole PFC design with 600 V-rated TI LMG3422 600V GaN FETs in the power stages. After the PFC section we find a phase-shifted full bridge rectifier with OnSemi’s SiC UF3C065030K4S Power N-Channel JFETs.

There were a few oddities in the design, such as the Kelvin source of the SiC JFET being tied into the source, which renders that feature useless. Sadly the performance of the PSU was not characterized before it was torn apart which might have provided some clues here.

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Poking At The ESP32-P4 And -C6 Dies In An ESP32-P4-M3 Module

February 19, 2026 by Maya Posch 7 Comments

The RF section of the ESP32-C6 die. (Credit: electronupdate, YouTube)

With the ESP32-P4 not having any wireless functionality and instead focusing on being a small SoC, it makes sense to combine it with a second chip that handles features like WiFi and Bluetooth. This makes the Guition ESP32-P4-M3 module both a pretty good example of how the P4 will be used, and an excellent opportunity to tear into, decap and shoot photos of the dies of both the P4 and the ESP32-C6 in this particular module, courtesy of [electronupdate]. There also the blog post for those who just want to ogle the shinies.

After popping the metal shield on the module, you can see the contents as in the above photo. The P4 inside is a variant with 32 MB of PSRAM integrated along with the SoC die. This results in a die shot both of this PSRAM and the P4 die, though enough of the top metal seems to remain to clearly see the latter.

The Boya brand Flash chip is quite standard inside, and along with a glance at the inside of one of the crystal oscillators we get to glance at the inside of the C6 MCU. This is a much more simple chip than the P4, with the RF section quite obvious. The total die sizes are 2.7 x 2.7 mm for the C6 and 4.29 x 3.66 mm for the P4.

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AirTag Has Hole Behind The Battery? It’s Likely Been Silenced

February 17, 2026 by Donald Papp 34 Comments

Apple AirTags have speakers in them, and the speaker is not entirely under the owner’s control. [Shahram] shows how the speaker of an AirTag can be disabled while keeping the device watertight. Because AirTags are not intended to be opened or tampered with, doing so boils down to making a hole in just the right place, as the video demonstrates.

By making a hole in just the right place, the speaker can be disabled while leaving water resistance intact.

How does putting a hole in the enclosure not compromise water resistance? By ensuring the hole is made in an area that is already “inside” the seal. In an AirTag, that seal is integrated into the battery compartment.

Behind the battery, the enclosure has a small area of thinner plastic that sits right above the PCB, and in particular, right above the soldered wire of the speaker. Since this area is “inside” the watertight seal, a hole can be made here without affecting water resistance.

Disabling the speaker consists of melting through that thin plastic with a soldering iron then desoldering the (tiny) wire and using some solder wick to clean up. It’s not the prettiest operation, but there are no components nor any particularly heat-sensitive bits in that spot. The modification has no effect on water resistance, and isn’t even visible unless the battery is removed.

In the video below, [Shahram] uses a second generation AirTag to demonstrate the mod, then shows that the AirTag still works normally while now being permanently silenced.

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Performing An Autopsy On 15 Dead Battle Born LFP Batteries

February 16, 2026 by Maya Posch 21 Comments

More molten plastic spacers between the bus bar and terminal. (Credit: Will Prowse)

Because size matters when it comes to statistics, [Will Prowse] decided to not just bank on his handful of failed Battle Born LFP batteries when it came to documenting their failure modes. Instead he got a whole gaggle of them from a viewer who had experienced failures with their Battle Born LFP batteries for an autopsy, adding a total of 15 samples to the data set.

Interestingly, the symptoms of these dead batteries are all over the place, from a refusal to charge, some have the overheating terminal, some do not show any sign of life, others have charged cells but a non-responsive BMS, etc. As [Will] notes, it’s important to test batteries with a load and a charger to determine whether they are functional not just whether you can measure a charge.

Although some of the batteries still showed enough signs of life to be put aside for some load testing, the remaining ones were cut open to check their insides. This revealed the typical molten plastic at the terminals, but also a lot of very loose connections for the internal wiring. Another battery showed signs of corrosion inside, which could be due to either moisture intrusion or a cell having leaked its electrolyte.

While the full results will hopefully be released soon, the worrying thing about this latest batch of Battle Born LFP batteries is that they span quite a few years, with one being from 2018. Although it’s comforting that not every one of these batteries is necessarily going to catch on fire within its approximate 8-year lifespan, a lot seems to depend on exactly how you load and charge them, as [Will] is trying to figure out with the upcoming load testing. With the unit that he recently purchased for testing it turned out that lower currents actually made the melting problem much worse.

Between this video and the much awaited follow-up, [Will] actually got his hands on a troubled 300A-rated industrial Battle Born battery. During testing that one actually failed violently with a cell venting and the loose BMS rattling around in the case.

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Inside A Fake Mean Well DIN-rail PSU

February 16, 2026 by Maya Posch 28 Comments

Looks just like the real deal in a dark cabinet. (Credit: Big Clive, YouTube)

These days, you can get fakes, bootlegs, and similar for just about anything. While a fake handbag isn’t such a big deal, in the case of a DIN-rail power supply, you’d better make sure that you got the real deal. Case in point, the fake ‘Mean Well’ DIN-rail PSU that [Big Clive] got his mitts on for a detailed analysis and teardown.

Even without taking a PSU apart there are often clear clues that you might be dealing with a fake, starting with the logo and the rest of the markings. Here it’s clear that the logo is designed to only appear to be the MW one at a quick glance, with the rest of the label being poorly copied English gibberish containing copious “unnecessary” double “quotes”.

So what do you get for £3-5 in this +12VDC, 1.25A rated PSU? Shockingly, the insides are actually quite decent and probably close to the genuine MW, with basic noise filtering, proper isolation, and apparently a real class-Y safety capacitor. Similarly, the chosen DK124 control IC is more than capable of the task, with a good circuit for the adjustable voltage control.

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Teardown Of An Apple AirTag 2 With Die Shots

February 2, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

There are a few possible ways to do a teardown of new electronics like the Apple AirTag 2 tracker, with [electronupdate] opting to go down to the silicon level, with die shots of the major ICs in a recent teardown video. Some high-resolution photos are also found on the separate blog page.

First we get to see the outside of the device, followed by the individual layers of the sandwiched rings of the device, starting with the small speaker, which is surrounded by the antenna for the ultrawide band (UWB) feature.

Next is the PCB layer, with a brief analysis of the main ICs, before they get lifted off and decapped for an intimate look at their insides. These include the Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 Bluetooth chip, which also runs the firmware of the device.

The big corroded-looking grey rectangle on the PCB is the UWB chip assembly, with the die shot visible in the heading image. It provides the localization feature of the AirTag that allows you to tell where the tag is precisely. In the die analysis we get a basic explanation of what the structures visible are for. Basically it uses an array of antennae that allows the determination of time-of-flight and with it the direction of the requesting device relative to it.

In addition to die shots of the BT and UWB chips we also get the die shot of the Bosch-made accelerometer chip, as well as an SPI memory device, likely an EEPROM of some description.

As for disabling the speaker in these AirTag 2 devices, it’s nestled deep inside, well away from the battery. This is said to make disabling it much harder without a destructive disassembly, yet as iFixit demonstrated, it’s actually fairly easy to do it non-destructively.

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Inside A Sketchy Mains Voltage Touch Control Dimmer

January 25, 2026 by Maya Posch 6 Comments

In [Big Clive]’s recent grab bag of tat ordered from Chinese commerce platforms, there were two touch light control boxes that can turn any ungrounded conductive surface into a mains load dimmer control. Of course, the primary reason for the purchase was a teardown, and a teardown we got.

These unassuming little boxes are built around the Tontek TT6061A, listed as a ‘touch dimmer’, which uses a triac to control the output current. There are four levels, ranging from off to full brightness, before the next touch event turns the output off again.

With the output off, [Clive] measured 0.7 W power usage. After popping open the plastic enclosure, the circuitry turned out to largely follow the recommended application circuit from the datasheet — as can be seen in the above screenshot — with apparently a few cost optimizations, in the form of omitted diodes and a capacitor.

The problem with these devices is that they are only really suitable for dimming low-power resistive loads like incandescent lights, with LED lights likely requiring the unpopulated capacitor spot on the PCB to be populated to tweak the chip’s triac timing, among other changes. There are also the slight issues with no real concern with them radiating EMI, and the exciting possibility of getting shocked at mains voltage without at least a class-Y capacitor installed.

Perhaps using a capacitive touch controller instead that works through plastic, for example, isn’t such a crazy alternative here, especially since they’re not really much more expensive and less likely to shock you. Want to create your own triac designs? We have just the post to get you started.

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