Saving An Expensive Sony HW65ES Projector With Some Fresh Chips

January 2, 2024 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

When you’re the proud owner of a beast of a projector like the Sony HW65ES (£2800 in 2016), you are understandably upset when it stops working. In the case of [Wettergren] it appears that a lightning strike in the Summer of 2021 managed to take out the HDMI inputs, with no analog or other input options remaining. Although a new board with the HDMI section would cost 500 €, it couldn’t be purchased separately, and a repair shop quoted 1800 € to repair it, which would be a raw deal. So, left with the e-waste or DIY repair options, [Wettergren] chose the latter.

Suffice it to say that taking one of these large projectors apart is rather an adventure, as is extracting the input PCB. On this board some probing showed that while the HDMI 2 port showed some signs of life, with its DDC lines functioning and the EDID readable. The HDMI 1 port had a dead short on these lines, which got traced back to a dead Sil9589CTUC IC, while HDMI was connected to the Sil9679 IC next to it. With this easy part done, the trick was finding replacements for what is decidedly not an off-the-shelf component, but fortunately EBay came through. This just left the slow agony of microsoldering to replace the dead IC, which ultimately succeeded.

After the second repair attempt in May of 2022, the projector is still working in December of 2023, proving that a bit of persistence, a bit of EBay luck and a microsoldering bench with the skills to use it can bring many devices back from the brink to give them a happy second life.

The scope, with new knobs and stickers on it, front panel renovated

Explosion-Scarred Scope Gets Plastic Surgery Hackerspace Style

January 2, 2024 by Arya Voronova 9 Comments

Some equipment comes with a backstory so impressive, you can’t help but treat it with reverence. For instance, this Hantek scope’s front panel and knobs have melted when a battery pack went up in flames right next to it. Then, it got donated to the CADR hackerspace, who have in turn given us a scope front panel refurbishing master class (translated, original), demonstrating just how well a typical hackerspace is prepared for performing plastic surgery like this.

All of the tools they used are commonplace hackerspace stuff, and if you ever wanted to learn about a workflow for repairs like these, their wiki post is a model example, described from start to end. They show how they could use a lasercutter to iterate through figuring out mechanical dimensions of the labels, cutting the silhouette out of cardboard as they tweaked the offsets. Then, they designed and printed out the new front panel stickers, putting them through a generic laminator to make them last. An FDM printer helped with encoder and button knob test fits, with the final version knobs made using a resin printer.

Everything is open-source – FreeCAD knob designs, SVG stickers, and their CorelDraw sources are linked in the post. With the open-source nature, there’s plenty of room to improvement – for instance, you can easily put these SVGs through KiCad and then adorn your scope with panels made out of PCBs! With this visual overhaul, the Hantek DSO5102P in question has gained a whole lot more character. It’s a comprehensive build, and it’s just one of the many ways you can compensate for a damaged or missing shell – check out our comprehensive DIY shell guide to learn more, and when you get to designing the front panel, we’ve highlighted a few lessons on that too.

Repairing An HP Power Supply

December 15, 2023 by Al Williams 3 Comments

One of the interesting things about living in modern times is that a confluence of the Internet and rapid changes in the electronics industry means that test gear that used to be astronomically priced is now super affordable. Especially if, like [Frankie Mashockie], you can do a little repair work. He picked up an HP6038A power supply for $50. We couldn’t find the original list price, but even refurbs from “professional” sources go for around $800. However, the $50 price came with a “for parts” disclaimer.

The power supply is autoranging. You usually think of that as a feature of meters. In a power supply, autoranging means the device can adjust the voltage based on load as you can see explained in the video below.

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Hacker Tactic: Internal ESD Diode Probing

December 14, 2023 by Arya Voronova 15 Comments

Humans are walking high voltage generators, due to all the friction with our surroundings, wide variety of synthetic clothes, and the overall ever-present static charges. Our electronics are sensitive to electrostatic discharge (ESD), and often they’re sensitive in a way most infuriating – causing spurious errors and lockups. Is there a wacky error in your design that will repeat in the next batch, or did you just accidentally zap a GPIO? You wouldn’t know until you meticulously check the design, or maybe it’s possible for you to grab another board.

Thankfully, in modern-day Western climates and with modern tech, you are not likely to encounter ESD-caused problems, but they were way more prominent back in the day. For instance, older hackers will have stories of how FETs were more sensitive, and touching the gate pin mindlessly could kill the FET you’re working with. Now, we’ve fixed this problem, in large part because we have added ESD-protective diodes inside the active components most affected.

These diodes don’t just help against ESD – they’re a general safety measure for protecting IC and transistor pins, and they also might help avoid damaging IC pins if you mix. They also might lead to funny and unexpected results, like parts of your circuit powering when you don’t expect them to! However, there’s an awesome thing that not that many hackers know — they let you debug and repair your circuits in a way you might not have imagined.

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Tech In Plain Sight: Super Glue

December 11, 2023 by Richard Baguley 68 Comments

Many inventions happen not by design but through failure. They don’t happen through the failure directly, but because someone was paying attention and remembered the how and why of the failure, and learns from this. One of these inventions is Super Glue, the adhesive that every tinkerer and engineer has to hand to stick pretty much anything to anything, quickly. Although it was a complete failure for the original uses it was developed for, a chemist with good memory and an eye for a helpful product created it in a process he described as “one day of synchronicity and ten years of hard work.”

Super Glue was initially invented in 1942, when the chemist Harry Coover was working on a team trying to develop a clear plastic gun sight that would be cheaper than the metal ones already in use. The team cast a wide net, trying a range of new materials. Coover was testing a class of chemicals called cyanoacrylates. They had some promise, but they had one problem: they stuck to pretty much everything. Every time that Coover tried to use the material to cast a gun sight, it stuck to the container and was really hard to remove.

When the samples he tried came into contact with water, even water vapor in the air, they immediately formed an incredibly resilient bond with most materials. That made them lousy manufacturing materials, so he put the cyanoacrylates aside when the contract was canceled. His employer B. F. Goodrich, patented the process of making cyanoacrylates in 1947, but didn’t note any particular uses for the materials: they were simply a curiosity.

It wasn’t until 1951 when Coover, now at Eastman Kodak, remembered the sticky properties of cyanoacrylates. He and his colleague Fred Joyner were working on making heat-resistant canopies for the new generation of jet fighters, and they considered using these sticky chemicals as adhesives in the manufacturing process. According to Coover, he told Joyner about the materials and asked him to measure the refractive index to see if they might be suitable for use. He warned him to be careful, as the material would probably stick in the refractometer and damage it. Joyner tested the material and found it wasn’t suitable for a canopy but then went around the lab using it to stick things together. The two realized it could make an excellent adhesive for home and engineering use. Continue reading “Tech In Plain Sight: Super Glue” →

The Latest John Deere Repair Lawsuit Now Has The Go-Ahead

December 8, 2023 by Jenny List 50 Comments

Long time readers will have followed the twists and turns of the John Deere repair saga, in which the agricultural machinery manufacturer has used DRM to restrict the repair of its tractors. It may be hot stuff on the prairies, but it matters to everyone because it’s a key right-to-repair battleground. Now the company’s attempt to throw out the latest class-action lawsuit, this time in Illinois. has failed, paving the way for a meaningful challenge.

This lawsuit is special because has the aim of determining whether or not Deere conspired to drive up the cost of repair and edge out independent mechanics. It comes against a backdrop in which their promised access to repair software which we reported on back in January has failed to materialize, and this is likely to figure as an act of bad faith.

A failing of corporate culture is that the organisation can in its own eyes, never be wrong. In Deere’s case they have accrued plenty of bad publicity in the years they’ve pursued this ill-advised business model, and in case that weren’t enough they’ve alienated their core customers out on the farms to the extent that a second-hand Deere from before the DRM era has more value than its newer counterparts. Deere genuinely do make very good tractors, so for farmers loyal for generations to turn their backs on them is a very significant story indeed. One has to ask, how much bad publicity and how many lawsuits do they have to have before someone at head office in Moline figures out that DRM in tractors (or anything else for that matter) isn’t the great idea they once thought it was? Maybe this one will finally herald the moment when that happens.

Header image: Nheyob / CC BY-SA 4.0

Resurrecting A Bricked Wii U With A Raspberry Pi Pico

November 29, 2023 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

There are reports that some Nintendo Wii U systems out in the wild are falling victim to mysterious failures. As is so often the case, certain error codes have been found in common across failed units out in the community, and [Voultar] decided to investigate to see if he could fix this problem with a little hacking.

[Voultar] wasn’t able to source a Wii U with the much-discussed NAND failure mode, but he was able to source a number of supposedly bricked Wii U systems displaying the error codes 160-0101 and 160-0103. The hack is achieved with an exploit in the Wii U’s USB Host Stack descriptor parsing module, developed by [GaryOderNichts]. It allows the injection of a payload that lets one run unsigned code on the Wii U, achieved via a Raspberry Pi Pico. The Pico is ultimately used to boot off an SD card running a recovery program for the Wii U. By resetting the Wii U’s “coldboot title ID”, it solves the error and gets the console booting properly, as per normal.

[Voultar] was able to fix five consoles displaying the common error messages, which we’d call a win. It’s not going to be a fix for every failed Wii U out there, but if you’ve got the dreaded 160-0101 or -0103 errors, it might be worth a shot.

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