repair

284 Articles

Fixing Sony And Philips’ Doomed CD-i Console

February 1, 2026 by 5 Comments

Although not intended to be a game console, the CD-i would see a a couple of games released for it that would cement its position in gaming history as the butt of countless jokes, some of which still make Nintendo upset to this day. That aside, it’s still a fascinating glimpse at the CD-based multimedia future envisioned in the early 90s, starting with its release in 1990. Recently [MattKC] decided to purchase another CD-i in a fit of nostalgic rage, and repair it to show the world what the future could have been like.

Although Sony and Philips co-developed the device, Sony would go on to release the PlayStation a few years later, which made the CD-i’s life and expectations for it that much harder, leading to it slowly fading into history. The Magnavox one that [MattKC] got is one of the later models, based on the CD-i 450 that was introduced in 1994 as one of the more gaming-oriented models.

As is typical with older devices that use optical media, it would not read discs. It also would sometimes boot up with a ‘Memory Full’ error. This is a common fault due to the built-in battery having run out, erasing RAM-stored values and causing random glitches like this when garbage values were read in on boot.

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Toasty Subwoofer Limps Back To Life

October 11, 2025 by 6 Comments

[JohnAudioTech] noticed there was no bass on the TV at his parents’ house. That led to the discovery of a blown fuse and a corresponding repair. When he opened it up, he could smell that something had gone on in the amplifier. You can follow the repair in the video below.

His first theory was that some glue became conductive and shorted the power rails. We were skeptical, to be honest. When he fed power to it through a current limiter, he could hear a sizzling noise and even see a little glowing from the hot component.

Disassembly ensued. Removing the suspect components showed some seriously burned components and some charring under a switching transistor. The capacitors looked much worse for wear, and the PCB needed some wires to jumper burned conductors.

At the end, there was thumping, so it seems the surgery was a success. However, testing blew a fuse again, which made us nervous. Still, seems to work if you don’t drive it too hard.

We always enjoy watching a teardown, and if there’s a repair too, that’s even better.

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Hackaday Links: September 28, 2025

September 28, 2025 by 14 Comments

In today’s “News from the Dystopia” segment, we have a story about fighting retail theft with drones. It centers on Flock Safety, a company that provides surveillance technologies, including UAVs, license plate readers, and gunshot location systems, to law enforcement agencies. Their flagship Aerodome product is a rooftop-mounted dock for a UAV that gets dispatched to a call for service and acts as an eye-in-the-sky until units can arrive on scene. Neat idea and all, and while we can see the utility of such a system in a first responder situation, the company is starting to market a similar system to retailers and other private sector industries as a way to contain costs. The retail use case, which the story stresses has not been deployed yet, would be to launch a drone upon a store’s Asset Protection team noticing someone shoplifting. Flock would then remotely pilot the drone, following the alleged thief back to their lair or hideout and coordinating with law enforcement, who then sweep in to make an arrest.

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IPhone Air Still Apparently Repairable Despite Its Compact Construction

September 22, 2025 by 13 Comments

Miniaturization is a trend that comes and goes in the cellular phone space. For a while, our phones were all getting smaller, then they started getting bigger again as screens expanded to show us ever more content and advertising. The iPhone air is going back the other way, with a design that aims to sell based on its slimness. [iFixit] reckons that despite its diminutive dimensions, it should still be quite repairable.

“Thinner usually means flimsier, harder to fix, and more glued-down parts, but the iPhone Air proves otherwise,” states Elizabeth Chamberlain for the repair outlet. Much of this comes down to clever design, that makes repair possible at the same time as ensuring compactness. A big part of this is the way that Apple made the bottom half of the phone pretty much just battery. Most of the actual electronic components are on a logic board up by the camera. Segmenting the phone in this way makes it easier to access commonly-replaced parts like the battery without having to pull a lot of other parts out of the way first.

[iFixit] refers to this as flattening the “disassembly tree”—minimizing the number of components you have to touch to replace what you’re there to fix. In this regard, the thinness of the iPhone Air is actually a boon. The phone is so thin, it wasn’t possible to stack multiple components on top of each other, so everything is easier to get to. The design is also reasonably modular, which should make routine repairs like USB C port swaps relatively straightforward.

Whatever smartphone you’re working on, it often helps to have a disassembly guide to ensure you don’t wreck it when you’re trying to fix something. [iFixit] remains a stellar resource in that regard. Continue reading “IPhone Air Still Apparently Repairable Despite Its Compact Construction” →

Looking in the back of the Tektronix 577

Repairing A Tektronix 577 Curve Tracer

September 4, 2025 by 5 Comments

Over on his YouTube channel our hacker [Jerry Walker] repairs a Tektronix 577 curve tracer.

A curve tracer is a piece of equipment which plots I-V (current vs voltage) curves, among other things. This old bit of Tektronix kit is rocking a CRT, which dates it. According to TekWiki the Tektronix 577 was introduced in 1972.

In this repair video [Jerry] goes to use his Tektronix 577 only to discover that it is nonfunctional. He begins his investigation by popping off the back cover and checking out the voltages across the voltage rails. His investigations suggest a short circuit. He pushes on that which means he has to remove the side panel to follow a lead into the guts of the machine.

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Battery Repair By Reverse Engineering

August 26, 2025 by 28 Comments

Ryobi is not exactly the Cadillac of cordless tools, but one still has certain expectations when buying a product. For most of us “don’t randomly stop working” is on the list. Ryobi 18-volt battery packs don’t always meet that expectation, but fortunately for the rest of us [Badar Jahangir Kayani] took matters into his own hands and reverse-engineered the pack to find all the common faults– and how to fix them.

[Badar]’s work was specifically on the Ryobi PBP005 18-volt battery packs. He’s reproduced the schematic for them and given a fairly comprehensive troubleshooting guide on his blog. The most common issue (65%) with the large number of batteries he tested had nothing to do with the cells or the circuit, but was the result of some sort of firmware lock.

It isn’t totally clear what caused the firmware to lock the batteries in these cases. We agree with [Badar] that it is probably some kind of glitch in a safety routine. Regardless, if you have one of these batteries that won’t charge and exhibits the characteristic flash pattern (flashing once, then again four times when pushing the battery test button), [Badar] has the fix for you. He actually has the written up the fix for a few flash patterns, but the firmware lockout is the one that needed the most work.

[Badar] took the time to find the J-tag pins hidden on the board, and flash the firmware from the NXP micro-controller that runs the show. Having done that, some snooping and comparison between bricked and working batteries found a single byte difference at a specific hex address. Writing the byte to zero, and refreshing the firmware results in batteries as good as new. At least as good as they were before the firmware lock-down kicked in, anyway.

He also discusses how to deal with unbalanced packs, dead diodes, and more. Thanks to the magic of buying a lot of dead packs on e-Bay, [Badar] was able to tally up the various failure modes; the firmware lockout discussed above was by far the majority of them, at 65%. [Badar]’s work is both comprehensive and impressive, and his blog is worth checking out even if you don’t use the green brand’s batteries. We’ve also embedded his video below if you’d rather watch than read and/or want to help out [Badar] get pennies from YouTube monetization. We really do have to give kudos for providing such a good write up along with the video.

This isn’t the first attempt we’ve seen at tearing into Ryobi batteries. When they’re working, the cheap packs are an excellent source of power for everything from CPap machines to electric bicycles.

Thanks to [Badar] for the tip.

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Silent Speak And Spell Gets Its Voice Back

August 18, 2025 by 4 Comments

While talking computers are old hat today, in 1978, a talking toy like the Speak and Spell was the height of novel tech. [Kevin] found a vintage one, but it didn’t work. It looked like someone had plugged in the wrong power adapter, leading to, undoubtedly, one or more unhappy children. There was some damage that suggests someone had already tried to repair it, but without success.

In addition to effecting the repair, [Kevin] took lots of pictures, so if you ever wanted to peek inside one of these, this is your chance. The case had no screws, just clips, although apparently some of the newer models did have some screws.

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