Repair Hacks

554 Articles

What Really Goes Wrong With Your Tablet

December 14, 2021 by 33 Comments

We’ve all seen our share of consumer electronic devices that need repair. It’s inevitable that, however well-cared-for it will be, there’s always the unforseen that brings its life to an end. Many of us will be using devices we’ve repaired ourselves, because often other people’s useless broken electronics can be our free stuff when we know how to fix them and they don’t. This is the arena the Restart Project operate in, as through their Restart Parties they provide repair services to save unnecessary landfill. Over nearly a decade in operation they’ve fixed a huge number of faulty items, and now they’re releasing some data and have analysed common fault modes and barriers to repair for some categories.

We’re restricted to tablets, printers, and batteries, and while many of the problems  are the wear-and-tear such as tablet screens, power supplies, charging connectors, and paper feeds that most of us would expect, it’s the barriers to repair which the Restart Project are keen to draw attention to. Products that are near-impossible to open without damage, parts such as batteries which are difficult to remove, and unavailability of spares. It’s to become part of their campaigning for legal repairability standards across Europe.

Aside from their own analysis, the full data is all available for download should you have any extra insights. We’ve made our position on this matter very clear indeed.

Oh Deere, Is That Right To Repair Resolution Troubling You?

December 14, 2021 by 103 Comments

Over the years a constant in stories covering the right to repair has come from an unexpected direction, the farming community. Their John Deer tractors, a stalwart of North American agriculture, have become difficult to repair due to their parts using DRM restricting their use to authorised Deere agents. We’ve covered farmers using dubious software tools to do the job themselves, we’ve seen more than one legal challenge, and it’s reported that the price of a used Deere has suffered as farmers abandon their allegiance to newer green and yellow machines. Now comes news of a new front in the battle, as a socially responsible investment company has the tractor giant scrambling to block their shareholder motion on the matter.

Deere have not been slow in their fight-back against the threat of right-to-repair legislation and their becoming its unwilling poster-child, with CTO Jahmy Hindman going on record stating that 98% of repairs to Deere machinery can be done by the farmer themself (PDF, page 5) without need for a Deere agent. The question posed by supporters of the shareholder action is that given the substantial risk to investors of attracting a right-to-repair backlash, why would they run such a risk for the only 2% of repairs that remain? We’d be interested to know how Deere arrived at that figure, because given the relatively trivial nature of some of the examples we’ve seen it sounds far-fetched.

It’s beyond a doubt that Deere makes high-quality agricultural machinery that many farmers, including at least one Hackaday scribe, have used to raise a whole heap of crops. The kind of generational brand loyalty they have among their customers simply can’t be bought by clever marketing, it’s been built up over a century and a half. As spectators to its willful unpicking through this misguided use of their repair operation we hope that something like this shareholder move has the desired effect of bringing it to a close. After all, it won’t simply be of benefit to those who wish to repair their tractor, it might just rescue their now-damaged brand before it’s too late.

Curious about previous coverage on this ongoing story? This article from last year will give context.

Header image: Nheyob / CC BY-SA 4.0

Controller Swaps Can Save An HDD If You Do It Right

December 11, 2021 by 22 Comments

Hard drives are fragile and reliable all at once. It’s entirely possible to have a hard drive fail, even if your data is still in perfect condition on the magnetic platters inside. [Keith Sherry] was recently trying to recover data for a friend off a damaged hard drive, and demonstrated that modern twists on old tricks can still work.

The drive in question was an old 160GB disk that itself was being used as a backup. Of course, a backup you haven’t tested is no backup at all, and this one failed in the hour it was most needed.

The suspicion was that the controller board was the culprit, and that swapping the board out might bring things back to life. Back in the day, this was a common hacker trick. However, it often fails with modern drives, which store a great deal of drive-specific calibration data on the controller board. Without this specific data, another controller will be unable to access the data on the drive, and could even cause damage.

However, as [Keith] demonstrates, there is a way around this. A controller from a similar drive was sourced, albeit from a SATA version of the drive versus the original which used USB. A single chip is then removed from the original controller, containing the calibration data specific to that drive. Soldering this chip onto the new controller got everything up and running, and the files could be recovered.

If your data is invaluable, it’s likely worth paying a professional. As [Keith] demonstrates though, the old tricks can still come in handy as long as your techniques are up to date. DIYing your own data recovery can be done, it’s just risky is all.

Oh, and don’t forget — once you’ve recovered the files, throw the drive away. Don’t keep using it! Video after the break.

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You Can’t Upgrade Soldered-On Laptop RAM? Think Again

November 24, 2021 by 82 Comments

Upgrading the memory in a computer is usually a straightforward case of swapping out a few DIMMs or SODIMMs, with the most complex task being to identify the correct type of memory from the many available. But sometimes a laptop manufacturer can be particularly annoying, and restrict upgradability by soldering the RAM chips directly to the board. Upgrading memory should then be impossible, but this reckons without the skills of [Greg Davill], who worked through the process on his Dell XPS13.

The write-up is a fascinating primer on how DRAM identification works, which for removable DIMMs is handled by an onboard FLASH chip containing the details of the chips on board. A soldered-on laptop has none of these, so instead it employs a series of resistors whose combination tells the BIOS what memory to expect. Some research revealed their configuration, at which point the correct chips were sourced. Surprisingly it’s not as easy as one might expect to buy small quantities of some RAM chips, but he was eventually able to find some via AliExpress. An aside is how he checked the chips he received for fakes, including the useful tip of hiring a dentist to take an x-ray.

The final step is the non-trivial task of reballing and reworking the new BGAs onto the board, before testing the laptop and finding the process to be a success. We’ll leave you with his final words though: “But next time I think I’ll just buy the 16GB variant upfront.“.

We’ve seen quite a lot of [Greg]’s work here at Hackaday, one of his most recent was this amazing LED D20.

Heathkit IM-13 VTVM Repair

November 7, 2021 by 16 Comments

If you are under a certain age, you might not know the initialism VTVM. It stands for vacuum tube voltmeter. At first glance, you might just think that was shorthand for “old voltmeter” but, in fact, a VTVM filled a vital role in the old days of measuring instruments. [The Radio Mechanic] takes us inside a Heathkit IM-13 that needed some loving, and for its day it was an impressive little instrument.

Today, our meters almost always have a FET front end and probably uses a MOSFET. That means the voltage measurement probes don’t really connect to the meter at all. In a properly working MOSFET, the DC resistance between the gate and the rest of the circuit is practically infinite. It is more likely that a very large resistor (like 10 megaohms) is setting the input impedance because the gate by itself could pick up electrostatic voltage that might destroy the device. A high resistance like that is great when you make measurements because it is very unlikely to disturb the circuit you are trying to measure and it leads to more accurate measurements.

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Bright Lightbulb Saves Old Radios

October 20, 2021 by 45 Comments

If you work on old equipment, you know that there’s always that tense moment when you first plug it in and turn it on. No matter how careful you have been, there’s some chance your garage sale find is going to go up in smoke. [BasinStreetDesign] built a little box that can help. On one side is a variac and the device you want to test goes into the other side.

In the middle? A lightbulb, a few switches, and a meter to monitor the current. The magic happens because the lightbulb will stay relatively cool and only light dimly if the device under test is drawing an appropriate amount of current. You match the bulb wattage with the approximate watts you expect the load to draw. If the device’s power is shorted to ground, though, the bulb will light brightly and this causes the lightbulb’s resistance to increase, thus helping to protect the device.

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The HP3458A: King Of Multimeters For Three Decades

October 18, 2021 by 16 Comments

[Marco] looks at a lot of meters. However, he considers the HP3458A the best even though they were introduced more than 30 years earlier in 1989. Someone donated one to [Marco] but it presented some error messages on startup and exhibited erratic behavior, so he had some repairs to do.

The error codes hinted there were issues with the multislope analog to digital converter and that’s what sets the meter apart, according to [Marco]. The meter has 8.5 digits, so a normal conversion stage won’t cut it.

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