Reviving An SD Card With Shorted Capacitors

August 28, 2026 by Maya Posch 18 Comments

A nice thing about SD cards is that even in their non-micro format they are conveniently small. This is however a bit of a problem when an SD card stops working, as they are not exactly designed to be easy to service, or to recover data from. There is however a very good chance that the Flash memory and controller are still fine, and it’s actually one of the passives on the tiny PCB that failed, as with the 32 GB SD card that [Yevgeniy Kapishon] recently diagnosed and recovered data from for a customer.

Tiny capacitors in an SD card package. (Credit: Aeson Labs)

A big hint during initial diagnostics was a clear short between the supply rail and ground, but as became clear when taking the SD card apart, this one was built as a monolithic package, without exposed components on a PCB as in older SD cards. Correspondingly an X-ray machine and thermal camera were used to figure out what was inside the package, and where the short was located.

By combining the hot spot image with the X-ray it was determined that the problem was with some passives near the edge of the package. Some careful material removal later two miniscule capacitors were found to be the culprit and gently removed. With this the short on the power rail vanished, and the SD card started working again.

Having a shorted MLCC or similar passive component is a very common failure mode in general which can cripple even the most expensive device. Even if SD cards still aren’t really repairable, it’s at least reassuring to know that in many cases the data is fairly easy to recover once you have identified and removed the offending part.

So, You Want To Fix An Old Camera

August 18, 2026 by Jenny List 14 Comments

Old cameras are a fantastic way to experiment with photography, and outside a few brands, they can be an inexpensive way too. It’s easy to find older cameras in a broken condition for a lot less money, but if you’re tempted to fix one then [enthdegree] has some advice for you.

It’s ostensibly a set of notes on the disassembly and repair of a Nikon F100 35mm film SLR, but along the way it’s full of useful tips and tricks for camera disassembly. he materials you’ll need, advice on not losing screws is one, and warnings against disassembling too much is another. It’s all the stuff he wished he’d known before starting, and now you can know it too.

Fixing up old cameras in this way is rewarding, and something we’ve certainly been known to do ourselves. But it’s worth bearing in mind that it’s not for the faint-hearted, and with decades of old film cameras sitting unused, often a working example might make more sense.

Radio Shack Toy Returns To Life

August 15, 2026 by Al Williams 29 Comments

[The Modern Rogue] found an old childhood friend in a closet: a Radio Shack 200-in-1 electronic kit. Along with [Josh Nass], he put it through its paces and made a few repairs along the way. As you might expect, the batteries had long ago leaked out their magic juice.

If you missed these, they were a host of real electronic components with springs connected to the leads. To make a circuit, you bend the spring over, insert a wire, and let go of the spring. By changing the wiring, you could make radios, alarms, computer circuits, and more

There were dozens of these kits, some more capable than others. This was a particularly nice one with a loaded front panel and several exotic components. In the end, they made a code practice oscillator, and it worked.

While you can’t find kits exactly like these anymore, you can make your own. Or try Snap Circuits and print your own modules. You take solderless breadboards for granted today, but they haven’t always been around or affordable.

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A Tape Deck Gets A Service

August 15, 2026 by Jenny List 7 Comments

If there’s an engineer’s equivalent to those YouTube ASMR videos, then perhaps it comes in a good repair or servicing journey filmed without edits at the bench. Relaxing to watch, has an interesting outcome. So it is with [Ken’s Shop], as he performs a full service on a Realistic cassette deck from we are guessing, the late 1970s or early 1980s.

These decks are nothing particularly special and can be found wherever second-hand consumer electronics go to die, but compared to may newer electronic devices they are surprisingly well-built. Their decades-old mechanicals usually only need a good clean and lubricate, their belts may need replacing, and perhaps the azimuth needs a tweak, but returning them to their former glory is rarely more than a bench session away.

So this is what we get, a relaxing twenty minutes or do of watching a guy fix a tape deck. A chuckle came here at Hackaday from our colleague Al passing this on, we agree with his not missing working on this type of deck as they could be fiddly. But still, if you find one of these and want it, they’re fixable with relative ease.

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Fixing A Dead Makita Battery With A 20 Cent Part

August 11, 2026 by Maya Posch 16 Comments

That's not what an NTC should be reading. (Credit: The Repair Forge, YouTube) — That’s not what an NTC should be reading. (Credit: The Repair Forge, YouTube)

It’s no real secret that battery packs for power tools aren’t the foremost when it comes to user serviceability, so if said battery pack suddenly stops charging outside of warranty, you generally just e-waste it. That’s what [The Repair Forge] could have done for the Makita battery pack in question, but instead it was opened up for a diagnosis and fix.

Rather than the charger throwing up an error with this specific battery, it would flash its red LED and run its fan, but never actually start the charging process. Apparently the charger seems to think that the battery is either too hot or cold to be charged, which already gives a big hint as to what might be wrong.

Using the open source PocketOBI tool it’s possible to query the battery, which showed that one of the internal thermistors reported the battery being at a chilly -30°C while the other a more reasonable 28°C. After popping open the pack and measuring the thermistors, the faulty one registered as infinite resistance thus confirming that it had failed.

By putting in a temporary resistor this diagnosis was confirmed, thus the next step will be to replace said thermistor. This same procedure was then used with a second battery, whose thermistor read a wild 64°C.

Overall it’s a pretty easy fix, using a 20 cent part, with the entirety of diagnosis to repair taking maybe ten minutes when using a tool like PocketOBI, itself based on the great Open Battery Information project that originally reverse-engineered the Makita battery protocol.

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The Stages Of Grief In Repairing A Trinitron Found In The Trash

August 9, 2026 by Maya Posch 29 Comments

Sometimes you see a project just staring at you with proverbial puppy dog eyes and you just cannot look away. In the case of a once rather nice Sony TV it was the smooth 32″ Trinitron CRT that gave [Happychoice] that look when he came across it along the side of the road. Naturally he had to beg the owner of the junkyard to please let him adopt the pupp^Wjunked TV and attempted an ill-advised repair.

Some later sleuthing revealed that this poor TV had been sitting on the side of that road for at least six years, exposed to the worst that the Italian weather and local fauna could do to it, so it was no surprise that all he got out of it even after cleaning and some repairs was a sad triple-blink of the power LED. This indicated that something on the control board was very unhappy about the status of the power supply.

Over the course of a few months this project went correspondingly from careful optimism down to the depths of depression, through the fields of bargaining and into the blue skies of acceptance of a likely far more involved repair session than originally assumed. That said, the CRT itself looks to be in pretty good nick, as do the PCBs barring the few sketchy resistors that already got replaced.

We would like to congratulate [Happychoice] on the acquisition of a fun new repair project and wish him all the luck on bringing this beast of a TV back to life.

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Fixing A JMicron-Based M.2 USB Enclosure That Stopped Working

July 30, 2026 by Maya Posch 10 Comments

As useful as USB-to-M.2 SSD adapters are, sometimes you come across a bit of a dud. A case in point is the Orico-branded TCM2-C3 that features both an attractive clear case and in its earlier revisions a JMicron controller-based circuit that apparently degrades over time, causing erratic boot behavior. After implementing a fix a few years ago, [Mark Furneaux] can happily report that the thus fixed enclosures are still working.

These faulty board revisions feature the JMicron JMS583 controller IC, which has a 1.0V core voltage input pin. Apparently to save power, Orico designed the board to target the minimum ~0.95V core voltage per the datasheet. Apparently due to component drift or degradation, this lower core voltage is after a while often not enough any more to start the controller, which thus translates into an unresponsive USB device and presumably some panic about lost data.

Although [Mark] doesn’t describe the fix in detail, it entails bumping up this core voltage to something closer to the nominal 1.0V, which restores functionality at the cost of presumably a measurable amount of extra heat production by said controller.

Later versions of the Orico TCM2-C3 enclosure switched from this JMicron controller to a Realtek one, which so far appears to be noticeably more reliable. Although Orico kept the same model name, the transparent enclosure makes it at least a snap to see which revision you are dealing with.

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