Benchmarking Repairability Scores With An Asus Tablet

July 14, 2026 by Maya Posch 13 Comments

A few years ago, France introduced a mandatory repairability score for consumer goods like laptops and tablets. It involves five criteria that range from documentation and availability of spare parts to ease of disassembly, with the manufacturer using a government-provided checklist to determine their score.

Recently Asus determined that their Asus ROG Flow Z13 – model GZ302EA – scored a 10 out of 10 using this system. This led [iFixit] to run the same tablet/laptop hybrid through their own rating system.

You can find the filled-out spreadsheet for this device here, with this Asus-provided site showing a list of devices that all score a 10/10 or a measly 9.9/10 according to this system. As a self-reported score it is hard to take it as the objective truth, as there is every incentive for the manufacturer to tweak the truth to their own benefit and gloss over inconveniences. This is where it’s interesting to compare it with [iFixit]’s 7/10 score.

On documentation, Asus gives itself a perfect score but [iFixit] finds it to be incomplete. Removal of one fan requires the disassembly of the cooler with its liquid metal thermal interface on the CPU. The wireless card, and most ports, are soldered to the mainboard. On the bright side, after you get the screen off, the insides are quite modular, which is a plus.

[iFixit] dings three points: for documentation, soldered-down components, and a fan accessibility glitch. Parts accessibility outside of France is also significantly harder, but one can hardly blame the French system for that. Overall the French self-reported rating would seem to be a fair start, but depending on which criteria you define as required you may find yourself disagreeing with the score.

In the case of LPDDR5 RAM one could argue for example that with LPCAMM2 modules soldering RAM onto the mainboard ought to be a thing of the past, and Wi-Fi modules should always be removable as well. You can take that up with the French regulators.

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Fixing The Fix For A 3dfx Voodoo Card’s Overly Bright Picture

July 10, 2026 by Maya Posch 6 Comments

After previously fixing an overly bright picture from a Voodoo graphics card with a simple resistor on one of the RAMDAC’s pins to correct its faulty internal Vref, [Bits und Bolts] got called out for not taking component drift into account. Thus in an update video he shows how instead to use an adjustable AMS1117 voltage regulator to hopefully prevent either the original issue or something new and exciting from cropping up later.

The basic idea here is to use the external voltage reference (Vref) pin for this ICS5342 RAMDAC and supply it with a constant 1.235V. If unused – as on this Orchid-branded Voodoo card – it is connected via an 0.1 microFarad capacitor to ground. This fortunately means that the pin is routed to easily accessible pads that make this modification relatively straightforward.

Basically this is where the AMS1117-ADJ chip comes into the picture, as a widely available adjustable LDO option, even if the 0.8A current rating is very much overkill for this application. With the supplied voltage the lowest voltage this LDO can output is around 1.25V, which is within the 1.10 – 1.35 V range of the datasheet.

Of course, with the PCB never having had a provision for this part, much of the rest of the video is about planning out where to place and route the components. After that tedious work and testing that nothing explodes, the new voltage is used for the RAMDAC’s Vref pin, fixing the brightness issue.

While one could argue that this RAMDAC is likely simply defective and already beginning to break down inside, this should at least give it a bit longer on what seems to be a little used card anyway.

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Reviving Mystery Nintendo 64 Game Cartridge Found In The Woods

July 9, 2026 by Maya Posch 20 Comments

As far as things go that you are likely to find during a relaxing walk in the forest, Nintendo 64 game cartridges probably do not rank high on that list. Yet this is what happened to a friend of [BlueBox Tinkers] a few years back, leaving him dying to see whether the cartridge would still work, as well as what game it is since its labels got obliterated courtesy of its time spent enjoying the outdoors. Fortunately he recently got a chance to see whether he could revive this cartridge.

The insides look pretty much like what you’d expect after presumably months or years of exposure, with the metal shield severely corroded. The PCB does however look pretty decent still, with obvious signs of corrosion on the front-side vias, and a pretty gross-looking back side.

Unfortunately it wasn’t confirmed whether this friend tried to stick this old cartridge into an N64 console, but [BlueBox Tinkers] wasn’t going to take any such chances. First up was an inspection and deep cleaning of the PCB, showing that it had escaped real damage, with the shield having taken the brunt of the corrosion. Cleaning up the shield and the insides of the plastic shell is by far the hardest part, with the pitted metal and rust stuck on the plastic. For a full restoration you’d probably want to for a reproduction shell and shield here.

Ultimately the game turned out to still work, with the mystery game sadly fairly predictable, but with someone’s old save files still intact. Somehow it seems that what Nintendo did to make N64 cartridges dust- and child-resistant also makes it survive in the woods, so if you find one during a forest walk, it’s totally worth it to adopt it and take it home.

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Fixing A Dodgy Cheap Audio DAC

July 9, 2026 by Jenny List 14 Comments

One of the attractions of buying at the bottom end of the electronics market by mail order from China is that you never quite know what will come your way. Sometimes it’s a diamond in the rough, while with others it’s a mess. Occasionally along comes something which should work but doesn’t, and that’s the moment when you wonder if you could fix it. [Nyanpasu64] had just such a device, an HDMI to VGA converter with audio that didn’t work. What could be wrong?

The HDMI to VGA chip has an onboard audio digital-to-analog converter (DAC), and it’s a delta-sigma design. This type of DAC is frequently used in audio applications because it works by shifting its switching frequency many times higher than the input sample rate, thus reducing considerably the distortion. This one wasn’t performing as advertised though, and the problem turned out to be that switching frequency being all over the output. Clearly the filter wasn’t working, which led to the design of a new filter. The write-up is therefore an extensive dive into filter design, and in part also a discovery of the effect of impedance on them.

For a super-cheap module to cause so much work, one might ask why not simply spend a few more dollars and get a better one. But had they done that we wouldn’t have seen this write-up, so we’re sticking with team cheap.

We’ve looked at audio DACs, in the past.

Fixing An Elgato Cam Link’s USB Current Draw Issue

June 26, 2026 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

Recently [Bits und Bolts] found himself in a bit of a pickle, when on boot his PC would complain about a connected USB device drawing too much power, before shutting down again. After unplugging various USB devices, the problem was narrowed down to an Elgato Cam Link 4K video capture device.

Some prodding and poking around with a thermal camera on the disassembled device while powered showed that an onboard IC had sprung a power leak. Sadly, even asking nicely, Elgato support wasn’t going to provide board-level repair help, so this was left as an exercise to the owner.

Although the markings on the chip didn’t offer much help, it turns out that this is a more common issue, with a convenient repair guide by [Uldis Melderis] identifying the part as the TI TLV62585 buck regulator.

After purchasing a couple of spares, the defective IC could then be replaced. Following this a quick test showing decidedly less angry electrons. From there it was a matter of reassembling the device in its plastic case and seeing whether the PC was happier with the now hopefully fixed device, which fortunately turned out to be the case.

Any such analysis and repair obviously raises a number of questions, such as why these buck regulators are dying, and why you’re supposed to just toss out a $100 device instead of doing a repair involving a $0.20 part and a few minutes with a hot air gun.

Fixing A Warped Paperback Spine With Gentle Heating

June 25, 2026 by Maya Posch 10 Comments

Although paperbacks are a much-loved aspect of the literary world, they are not really intended to last the decades the way that hardcover books are. Beyond the typical ravaged covers, paperbacks also tend to suffer from a warped spine, where the formally flat spine gets a definite inwards curve due to the ravages of moisture, temperature, failing glue and the passing of time in general. If this bothers you, then [Book Care Studio] shows a simple technique using which these spines can be flattened again.

All that you need for this approach are two cutting boards and two clamps to provide some clamping force on the book, along with a heat gun and some patience.

The book is clamped between the two boards with the spine sticking out. By putting said spine flat on e.g. a table and pushing on the opposite side while alternatingly briefly releasing the clamps, the spine can be forced into a flatter state. Without forcing this and then flipping the paperback sandwich around to heat the spine with the heat gun, the glue of the binding in the spine can then be softened sufficiently that a few of these push-heat cycles should be enough to straighten the spine.

Other than rebinding the book as for example public libraries are wont to do with a hardcover conversion of flimsy paperbacks, this simple approach should clean up a ratty-looking paperback collection. While one can definitely argue that half the charm of old paperbacks are the wrinkles, curves and intense smell of acidifying paper, it’s always good to have options like this at one’s disposal.

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Repairing A Pair Of Voodoo 2 GPUs For Some SLI Action

June 11, 2026 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

Well there's your problem. (Credit: Bits und Bolts, YouTube) — Well there’s your problem. (Credit: Bits und Bolts, YouTube)

Recently [Bits und Bolts] stumbled over a pair of Dragon 3000 branded 3dfx Voodoo 2 cards in his unfixed cards pile, and decided that the best course of action was to not only fix them, but also run them in SLI for some sweet Unreal Tournament action. Naturally, these cards being in the broken cards pile meant that he first had to figure out why they were broken and fix all issues.

The advantage of having two identical Voodoo 2 cards is of course that any missing components, like some resistors on one card, could be referenced on the other card. Beyond that it was mostly a matter of reflowing clearly corroded pins on the ICs and replacing damaged resistors and resistor arrays before the first tests could be run.

Using the mojo utility it was easy enough to spot that there were still some lingering issues, with clear issues visible in 3D games as well. These were tracked down to a dodgy pin on one of the texture mapping units (TMUs) that needed some more reflowing, and a very sneaky resistor array that was cracked but not obviously so until prodded with a multimeter.

With both cards now making happy noises when individually tested, it was time to go full SLI, fire up the Pentium 2 system and enjoy the glory of 24 MB of VRAM at high resolutions in Unreal Tournament. Considering that the bloke who had sent in these cards had found them while cleaning up a shed, it’s quite amazing how little rework was needed to once again party like it’s 1999.

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