Diagnosing Whisker Failure Mode In AF114 And Similar Transistors

The inside of this AF117 transistor can was a thriving whisker ecosystem. (Credit: Anthony Francis-Jones)
The inside of this AF117 transistor can was a thriving whisker ecosystem. (Credit: Anthony Francis-Jones)

AF114 germanium transistors and related ones like the AF115 through AF117 were quite popular during the 1960s, but they quickly developed a reputation for failure. This is due to what should have made them more reliable, namely the can shielding the germanium transistor inside that is connected with a fourth ‘screen’ pin. This failure mode is demonstrated in a video by [Anthony Francis-Jones] in which he tests a number of new-old-stock AF-series transistors only for them all to test faulty and show clear whisker growth on the can’s exterior.

Naturally, the next step was to cut one of these defective transistors open to see whether the whiskers could be caught in the act. For this a pipe cutter was used on the fairly beefy can, which turned out to rather effective and gave great access to the inside of these 1960s-era components. The insides of the cans were as expected bristling with whiskers.

The AF11x family of transistors are high-frequency PNP transistors that saw frequent use in everything from consumer radios to just about anything else that did RF or audio. It’s worth noting that the material of the can is likely to be zinc and not tin, so these would be zinc whiskers. Many metals like to grow such whiskers, including lead, so the end effect is often a thin conductive strand bridging things that shouldn’t be. Apparently the can itself wasn’t the only source of these whiskers, which adds to the fun.

In the rest of the video [Anthony] shows off the fascinating construction of these germanium transistors, as well as potential repairs to remove the whisker-induced shorts through melting them. This is done by jolting them with a fairly high current from a capacitor. The good news is that this made the component tester see the AF114 as a transistor again, except as a rather confused NPN one. Clearly this isn’t an easy fix, and it would be temporary at best anyway, as the whiskers will never stop growing.

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Phone Keyboard Reverse Engineered

Who knows what you’ll find in a second-hand shop? [Zeal] found some old keyboards made to fit early Alcatel phones from the year 2000 or so. They looked good but, of course, had no documentation. He’s made two videos about his adventure, and you can see them below.

The connector was a cellphone-style phone jack that must carry power and some sort of serial data. Inside, there wasn’t much other than a major chip and a membrane keyboard. There were a few small support chips and components, too.

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Animal Crossing keyboard banner

Making GameCube Keyboard Controller Work With Animal Crossing

[Hunter Irving] is a talented hacker with a wicked sense of humor, and he has written in to let us know about his latest project which is to make a GameCube keyboard controller work with Animal Crossing.

This project began simply enough but got very complicated in short order. Initially the goal was to get the GameCube keyboard controller integrated with the game Animal Crossing. The GameCube keyboard controller is a genuine part manufactured and sold by Nintendo but the game Animal Crossing isn’t compatible with this controller. Rather, Animal Crossing has an on-screen keyboard which players can use with a standard controller. [Hunter] found this frustrating to use so he created an adapter which would intercept the keyboard controller protocol and replace it with equivalent “keypresses” from an emulated standard controller.

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Video Game Preservation Through Decompilation

Unlike computer games, which smoothly and continuously evolved along with the hardware that powered them, console games have up until very recently been constrained by a generational style of development. Sure there were games that appeared on multiple platforms, and eventually newer consoles would feature backwards compatibility that allowed them to play select titles from previous generations of hardware. But in many cases, some of the best games ever made were stuck on the console they were designed for.

Now, for those following along as this happened, it wasn’t such a big deal. For gamers, it was simply a given that their favorite games from the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) wouldn’t play on the Nintendo 64, any more than their Genesis games could run on their Sony PlayStation. As such, it wasn’t uncommon to see several game consoles clustered under the family TV. If you wanted to go back and play those older titles, all you had to do was switch video inputs.

But gaming, and indeed the entertainment world in general, has changed vastly over the last couple of decades. Telling somebody today that the only way they can experience The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is by dragging out some yellowed thirty-odd year old console from the attic is like telling them the only way they can see a movie is by going to the theater.

These days, the expectation is that entertainment comes to you, not the other way around — and it’s an assumption that’s unlikely to change as technology marches on. Just like our TV shows and movies now appear on whatever device is convenient to us at the time, modern gamers don’t want to be limited to their consoles, they also want to play games on their phones and VR headsets.

But that leaves us with a bit of a problem. There are some games which are too significant, either technically or culturally, to just leave in the digital dust. Like any other form of art, there are pieces that deserve to be preserved for future generations to see and experience.

For the select few games that are deemed worth the effort, decompilation promises to offer a sort of digital immortality. As several recent projects have shown, breaking a game down to its original source code can allow it to adapt to new systems and technologies for as long as the community wishes to keep them updated.

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Flopped Humane “AI Pin” Gets An Experimental SDK

The Humane AI Pin was ambitious, expensive, and failed to captivate people between its launch and shutdown shortly after. While the units do contain some interesting elements like the embedded projector, it’s all locked down tight, and the cloud services that tie it all together no longer exist. The devices technically still work, they just can’t do much of anything.

The Humane AI Pin had some bold ideas, like an embedded projector. (Image credit: Humane)

Since then, developers like [Adam Gastineau] have been hard at work turning the device into an experimental development platform: PenumbraOS, which provides a means to allow “untrusted” applications to perform privileged operations.

As announced earlier this month on social media, the experimental SDK lets developers treat the pin as a mostly normal Android device, with the addition of a modular, user-facing assistant app called MABL. [Adam] stresses that this is all highly experimental and has a way to go before it is useful in a user-facing sort of way, but there is absolutely a workable architecture.

When the Humane AI Pin launched, it aimed to compete with smartphones but failed to impress much of anyone. As a result, things folded in record time. Humane’s founders took jobs at HP and buyers were left with expensive paperweights due to the highly restrictive design.

Thankfully, a load of reverse engineering has laid the path to getting some new life out of these ambitious devices. The project could sure use help from anyone willing to pitch in, so if that’s up your alley be sure to join the project; you’ll be in good company.

The Cost Of A Cheap UPS Is 10 Hours And A Replacement PCB

Recently [Florin] was in the market for a basic uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to provide some peace of mind for the smart home equipment he had stashed around. Unfortunately, the cheap Serioux LD600LI unit he picked up left a bit to be desired, and required a bit of retrofitting.

To be fair, the issues that [Florin] ended up dealing with were less about the UPS’ capability to deal with these power issues, and more with the USB interface on the UPS. Initially the UPS seemed to communicate happily with HomeAssistant (HA) via Network UPS Tools over a generic USB protocol, after figuring out what device profile matched this re-branded generic UPS. That’s when HA began to constantly lose the connection with the UPS, risking its integration in the smart home setup.

The old and new USB-serial boards side by side. (Credit: VoltLog, YouTube)
The old and new USB-serial boards side by side. (Credit: VoltLog, YouTube)

After tearing down the UPS to see what was going on, [Florin] found that it used a fairly generic USB-serial adapter featuring the common Cypress CY7C63310 family of low-speed USB controller. Apparently the firmware on this controller was simply not up to the task or poorly implemented, so a replacement was needed.

The process and implementation is covered in detail in the video. It’s quite straightforward, taking the 9600 baud serial link from the UPS’ main board and using a Silabs CP2102N USB-to-UART controller to create a virtual serial port on the USB side. These conversion boards have to be fully isolated, of course, which is where the HopeRF CMT8120 dual-channel digital isolator comes into play.

After assembly it almost fully worked, except that a Sonoff Zigbee controller in the smart home setup used the same Silabs controller, with thus the same USB PID/VID combo. Fortunately in Silabs AN721 it’s described how you can use an alternate PID (0xEA63) which fixed this issue until the next device with a CP2102N is installed

As it turns out, the cost of a $40 UPS is actually 10 hours of work and $61 in parts, although one cannot put a value on all the lessons learned here.

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Fault Analysis Of A 120W Anker GaNPrime Charger

Taking a break from his usual prodding at suspicious AliExpress USB chargers, [DiodeGoneWild] recently had a gander at what used to be a good USB charger.

The Anker 737 USB charger prior to its autopsy. (Credit: DiodeGoneWild, YouTube)
The Anker 737 USB charger prior to its autopsy.

Before it went completely dead, the Anker 737 GaNPrime USB charger which a viewer sent him was capable of up to 120 Watts combined across its two USB-C and one USB-A outputs. Naturally the charger’s enclosure couldn’t be opened non-destructively, and it turned out to have (soft) potting compound filling up the voids, making it a treat to diagnose. Suffice it to say that these devices are not designed to be repaired.

With it being an autopsy, the unit got broken down into the individual PCBs, with a short detected that eventually got traced down to an IC marked ‘SW3536’, which is one of the ICs that communicates with the connected USB device to negotiate the voltage. With the one IC having shorted, it appears that it rendered the entire charger into an expensive paperweight.

Since the charger was already in pieces, the rest of the circuit and its ICs were also analyzed. Here the gallium nitride (GaN) part was found in the Navitas GaNFast NV6136A FET with integrated gate driver, along with an Infineon CoolGaN IGI60F1414A1L integrated power stage. Unfortunately all of the cool technology was rendered useless by one component developing a short, even if it made for a fascinating look inside one of these very chonky USB chargers.

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