IFixit Releases Command Line Docs For FixHub Iron

January 11, 2025 by Tom Nardi 16 Comments

When we reviewed the iFixit FixHub back in September, one of the most interesting features of the portable soldering station was the command line interface that both the iron and the base station offered up once you connected to them via USB. While this feature wasn’t documented anywhere, it made a degree of a sense, as the devices used WebSerial to communicate with the browser. What was less clear at the time was whether or not the user was supposed to be fiddling with this interface, or if iFixit intended to lock it up in a future firmware update.

Thanks to a recent info dump on GitHub, it seems like we have our answer. In the repo, iFixit has provided documentation for each individual command on both the iron and base, including some background information and application notes for a few of the more esoteric functions. A handful of the commands are apparently disabled in the production version of the firmware, but there’s still plenty to poke around with.

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The Engineer Behind Mine Detection

January 10, 2025 by Al Williams 8 Comments

According to [Joanna Goodrich] in IEEE Spectrum, prior to World War II, soldiers who wanted to find land mines, simply poked at the ground with pointed sticks or bayonets. As you might expect, this wasn’t very safe or reliable. In 1941, a Polish signals officer, [Józef Stanislaw Kosacki], escaped to Britain and created an effective portable mine detector.

[Kosaci] was an electrical engineer trained at the Warsaw University of Technology. He had worked as a manager for the Polish National Telecommunication Institute. In 1937, the government tasked him with developing a machine that could detect unexploded grenades and shells. The machine was never deployed.

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, [Kosacki] returned to military service (he had done a year of compulsory service earlier). He was captured and kept in a prison camp in Hungary. But he managed to escape in late 1939 and joined the Polish Army Corps in Britain, teaching Morse code to soldiers.

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Retrotechtacular: Soldering The Tek Way

January 9, 2025 by Dan Maloney 40 Comments

For a lot of us, soldering just seems to come naturally. But if we’re being honest, none of us was born with a soldering iron in our hand — ouch! — and if we’re good at soldering now, it’s only thanks to good habits and long practice. But what if you’re a company that lives and dies by the quality of the solder joints your employees produce? How do you get them to embrace the dark art of soldering?

If you’re Tektronix in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the answer is simple: make in-depth training videos that teach people to solder the Tek way. The first video below, from 1977, is aimed at workers on the assembly line and as such concentrates mainly on the practical aspects of making solid solder joints on PCBs and mainly with through-hole components. The video does have a bit of theory on soldering chemistry and the difference between eutectic alloys and other tin-lead mixes, as well as a little about the proper use of silver-bearing solders. But most of the time is spent discussing the primary tool of the trade: the iron. Even though the film is dated and looks like a multi-generation dupe from VHS, it still has a lot of valuable tips; we’ve been soldering for decades and somehow never realized that cleaning a tip on a wet sponge is so effective because the sudden temperature change helps release oxides and burned flux. The more you know.

The second video below is aimed more at the Tek repair and rework technicians. It reiterates a lot of the material from the first video, but then veers off into repair-specific topics, like effective desoldering. Pro tip: Don’t use the “Heat and Shake” method of desoldering, and wear those safety glasses. There’s also a lot of detail on how to avoid damaging the PCB during repairs, and how to fix them if you do manage to lift a trace. They put a fair amount of emphasis on the importance of making repairs look good, especially with bodge wires, which should be placed on the back of the board so they’re not so obvious. It makes sense; Tek boards from the era are works of art, and you don’t want to mess with that.

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No Frills PCB Brings USB-C Power To The Breadboard

January 6, 2025 by Tom Nardi 30 Comments

At this point, many of us have gone all-in on USB-C. It’s gotten to the point that when you occasionally run across a gadget that doesn’t support being powered USB-C, the whole experience seems somewhat ridiculous. If 90% of your devices using the same power supply, that last 10% starts feeling very antiquated.

So why should your breadboard be any different? [Axiometa] has recently unveiled a simple PCB that will plug into a standard solderless breadboard to provide 3.3 and 5 VDC when connected to a USB-C power supply. The device is going to start a crowdfunding campaign soon if you want to buy a completed one — but with the design files and Bill of Materials already up on GitHub, nothing stops you from spinning up your own version today.

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Turning A Lada Into An EV With 50 Cordless Drills, Because Why Not?

January 1, 2025 by Donald Papp 47 Comments

[Garage 54] is no stranger to vehicle-related projects of the “because why not?” variety, and their latest is using 50 cordless drills combined into a monstrous mega-motor to turn a gutted (and extended) Lada into an electric vehicle (EV).

Doing this leans on some of [Garage 54]’s earlier projects, such as replacing the aforementioned Lada’s engine block with a frame containing sixteen chainsaws. That means they don’t need to start completely from scratch, and have a frame design that can drop into the vehicle once the “engine” is constructed.

Fifty cordless drills won’t set any efficiency records for EV engines, but it’s got a certain style.

Here’s what’s in the new engine: each of the drills has its chuck replaced with an aluminum pulley, and belts connect each group of drills to an output shaft. Ideally, every drill motor would run at the same time and at exactly the same speed, but one works with what they have. [Garage 54] originally worked to synchronize the drills by interfacing to each drill’s motor control board, but eventually opted to simply bypass all controls and power each drill’s motor directly from the batteries. Initial tests are done by touching bare cable ends with a turned-away face and squinted eyes, but we expect “Just A Big Switch” to end up in the final assembly.

It looks wild and we can think of more than a few inefficiencies present in a system like this, but the output shaft does turn and torque is being transferred, so the next step is interfacing to the car’s factory gearbox.

If it powers the car in any meaningful way, that Lada might very well become the world’s most gloriously hacked-together EV. And hey, if the power output of the EV motor is disappointing, you can just make your own.

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Wire Rope: Never Saddle A Dead Horse

December 29, 2024 by Adam Fabio 26 Comments

If you’re into building large projects, you’ll eventually find yourself looking at wire rope. Multistrand steel wire used as antenna guy wires, bridge supports, and plenty of other uses. The [HowNot2] team tested an old rule of thumb for wire rope. “Never saddle a dead horse”.

Click through the break for more:

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Blast Away The Flux — With Brake Cleaner?

December 26, 2024 by Dan Maloney 74 Comments

Can you use brake cleaner for flux removal on PCBs? According to [Half Burnt Toast], yes you can. But should you? Well, that’s another matter.

In our experience, flux removal seems to be far more difficult than it should be. We’ve seen plenty of examples of a tiny drop of isopropyl alcohol and a bit of light agitation with a cotton swab being more than enough to loosen up even the nastiest baked-on flux. If we do the same thing, all we get is a gummy mess embedded with cotton fibers smeared all over the board. We might be doing something wrong, or perhaps using the wrong flux, but every time we get those results, we have to admit toying with the idea of more extreme measures.

The LED bar graphs were not a fan of the brake cleaner.

[Toast] went there, busting out a fresh can of brake cleaner and hosing down some of the crustier examples in his collection. The heady dry-cleaner aroma of perchloroethylene was soon in the air, and the powerful solvent along with the high-pressure aerosol blast seemed to work wonders on flux. The board substrate, the resist layer, and the silkscreen all seemed unaffected by the solvent, and the components were left mostly intact; one LED bar graph display did a little melty, though.

So it works, but you might want to think twice about it. The chlorinated formula he used for these tests is pretty strong stuff, and isn’t even available in a lot of places. Ironically, the more environmentally friendly stuff seems like it would be even worse, loaded as it is with acetone and toluene. Whichever formula you choose, proceed with caution and use the appropriate PPE.

What even is flux, and what makes it so hard to clean? Making your own might provide some answers.

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