Saving A Rental Ebike From The Landfill

November 23, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 13 Comments

One of the hardest things about owning a classic car is finding replacement parts. Especially if the car is particularly old or rare, or if the parent company is now out of business, sometimes this can be literally impossible and a new part will have to be manufactured from scratch. The same is true of bicycles as well, and there are plenty of defunct bicycle manufacturers to choose from. [Berm Peak] found a couple old rental ebikes from a company that’s not in business anymore and set about trying to get them working again. (Video, embedded below.)

Of course, unlike many classic cars, ebikes are encumbered by proprietary electronics and software that are much harder to replace than most physical components. As a result, these bikes get most of their electronics pulled out and directly replaced. This bike also had a seized motor, so [Berm Peak] replaced it with another hub motor he had in his shop. Some of the other highlights in the build include a custom 3D-printed latching mechanism for the battery’s attachment point at the frame, a 3D printed bezel for the new display and control unit, and the reuse of some of the other fun parts of the bike like the front basket and integrated headlight.

There are a few reasons for putting so much work into a bike like this. For this specific bike at least, the underlying components are worth saving; the sturdy metal frame and belt drivetrain are robust and won’t need much maintenance in the long term. It also only cost around $500 in parts to build a bike that would take around $2,000 to purchase new, so there’s some economic incentive as well. And in general it’s more fun and better for the world to fix things like this up and get them running again rather than buying something new off the shelf. And while proprietary electronics like those found on this bike are ubiquitous in the ebike world, they’re not all completely closed-source.

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There’s Now A Wiki For Hacking Redbox Machines

November 21, 2024 by Lewin Day 11 Comments

With the rapidly evolving situation surrounding the Redbox vending machines still out in the wild, it’s about time somebody put together a Wiki to keep it all straight.

The unredbox wiki has information on the various different hardware revisions that Redbox put out into the wild, from the regular outdoor machines to the weird indoor blue variant. The site also has breakdowns on individual components. For example, it covers the computers inside the machines, built by Dell, Lenovo, and Premio, and bits and pieces like the DVD carousel and the modems used inside.

Basically, if you’re working with these machines and you don’t have a manual, this resource could help you out. As could the neat video below that shows the internals of a Redbox machine during the reloading process.

Whatever you do, though, don’t steal the kiosks. There’s folks handling that already, you’re not allowed to just walk up and haul them away. Check out our earlier coverage of people that are still out there renting from these machines, too.

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The Great Redbox Cleanup: One Company Is Hauling Away America’s Last DVD Kiosks

November 19, 2024 by Lewin Day 91 Comments

Remember Redbox? Those bright red DVD vending machines that dotted every strip mall and supermarket in America, offering cheap rentals when Netflix was still stuffing discs into paper envelopes? After streaming finally delivered the killing blow to physical rentals, Redbox threw in the towel in June 2024, leaving around 34,000 kiosks standing as silent monuments to yet another dead media format.

Last month, we reported that these machines were still out there, barely functional and clinging to life. Now, a company called The Junkluggers has been tasked with the massive undertaking of clearing these mechanical movie dispensers from the American retail landscape, and they’re doing it in a surprisingly thoughtful way. I chatted to them to find out how it’s going.

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Redbox Is Dead, But The Machines Are Kind Of Hanging On

October 17, 2024 by Lewin Day 36 Comments

Redbox was a service for renting DVDs from automated kiosks. The business was going well until it wasn’t anymore, and then the company went bankrupt in July this year. And yet… the machines live on. At least, that’s according to YouTuber [Smokin’ Silicon], who spotted some remaining Redbox kiosks out and about. Including at his local Walmart!

Here’s the thing. There’s not one big switch at Redbox that turns all the machines off, and even if there was—nobody hit it the moment the company declared bankruptcy. Thus, when [Smokin’ Silicon] rocked up to Walmart, he was able to flick through the movies and even add one to cart for purchase. However, trying to complete the transaction failed—the kiosk eventually reported itself as out of service. That makes sense—you’d expect payment processing to be the first thing to go down.

However, other Redbox kiosks were different. A kiosk at a Food Lion location actually still worked—and [Smokin’ Silicon] was able to complete the transaction and walk away with a Black Adam disc! On a second trip, he was able to walk away with even more!

The rest of the video dives into Redbox lore and other posts online about the status of the company, software, and hardware. Apparently, someone on Reddit was claiming they had the Redbox kiosk OS available. Meanwhile, some users have had trouble returning their discs because the company is now defunct. However, [Smokin’ Silicon] was able to return his without issue. Ultimately, though, he recommends his viewers to go out and score as many DVDs and Blu Rays as possible from the machines since soon enough, they’ll be gone forever.

The fact is, businesses are big and Kafkaesque, the kiosks are scattered all over the country, and so it’s anybody’s guess if and when they stop working. Back when this website began, a redbox was something different entirely. Video after the break.

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Hackaday Links: March 3, 2024

March 3, 2024 by Dan Maloney 26 Comments

Who’d have thought that $30 doorbell cameras would end up being security liabilities? That’s the somewhat obvious conclusion reached by Consumer Reports after looking at some entry-level doorbell cameras available through the usual outfits and finding glaring security gaps which are totally not intentional in any way.

All these cameras appear to be the same basic hardware inside different enclosures, most supporting the same mobile app. Our favorite “exploit” for these cameras is the ability to put them into a pairing mode with the app, sometimes by pressing a public-facing button. Slightly more technically challenging would be accessing images from the app using the camera’s serial number, or finding file names being passed in plain text while sniffing network traffic. And that’s just the problems CR identified; who knows what else lurks under the covers? Some retailers have stopped offering these things, others have yet to, so buyer beware.

Speaking of our techno-dystopian surveillance state, if you’ve had it with the frustrations and expense of printers, has Hewlett-Packard got a deal for you. They want you to never own a printer again, preferring that you rent it from them instead. Their “All-In Plan” launched this week, which for $6.99 a month will set up up with an HP Envy inkjet printer, ink deliveries, and 24/7 tech support. It doesn’t appear that paper is included in the deal, so you’re on your own for that, but fear not — you won’t go through much since the entry-level plan only allows 20 prints per month. Plans scale up to 700 prints per month from an OfficeJet Pro for the low, low price of $36. The kicker, of course, is that ~~your~~ their printer has to be connected to the Internet, and HP can pretty much brick the thing anytime they want to. The terms of service also explicitly state that they’ll be sending your information to advertising partners, so that’ll be fun. This scheme hearkens back to the old pre-breakup days of AT&T, where you rented your phone from the phone company. That model made a lot more sense when the phone (probably) wasn’t listening in on everything you do. This just seems like asking for trouble.

“Enhance, enhance…” Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/IRAP/Simeon Schmauß

It’s been a while since Ingenuity‘s final rough landing on Mars permanently grounded the overachieving helicopter, long enough that it’s time for the post-mortem analyses to begin. The first photographic evidence we had was a shadowgram from one of the helicopter’s navigational cameras, showing damage to at least one of the rotor tips, presumably from contact with the ground. Then we were treated to a long-distance shot from Ingenuity‘s rover buddy Perseverance, which trained its MASTCAM instruments on the crash zone and gave us a wide view of its lonely resting place.

Now, geovisual design student [Simeon Schmauβ] has taken long shots made with the rover’s SuperCam instrument and processed them into amazingly detailed closeups, which show just how extensive the damage really is. One rotor blade sheared clean off on contact, flying 15 meters before gouging a hole in the regolith. Another blade looks to be about half gone, while the remaining two blades show the damaged tips we’ve already seen. That the helicopter is still on its feet given the obvious violence of the crash is amazing, as well as an incredible piece of luck, since it means the craft’s solar panel is pointing in roughly the right direction to keep it powered up.

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