right to repair

50 Articles

Have Li-ion Batteries Gone Too Far?

March 13, 2025 by 84 Comments

The proliferation of affordable lithium batteries has made modern life convenient in a way we could only imagine in the 80s when everything was powered by squadrons of AAs, or has it? [Ian Bogost] ponders whether sticking a lithium in every new device is really the best idea.

There’s no doubt, that for some applications, lithium-based chemistries are a critically-enabling technology. NiMH-based EVs of the 1990s suffered short range and slow recharge times which made them only useful as commuter cars, but is a flashlight really better with lithium than with a replaceable cell? When household electronics are treated as disposable, and Right to Repair is only a glimmer in the eye of some legislators, a worn-out cell in a rarely-used device might destine it to the trash bin, especially for the less technically inclined.

[Bogost] decries “the misconception that rechargeables are always better,” although we wonder why his article completely fails to mention the existence of rechargeable NiMH AAs and AAAs which are loads better than their forebears in the 90s. Perhaps even more relevantly, standardized pouch and cylindrical lithium cells are available like the venerable 18650 which we know many makers prefer due to their easy-to-obtain nature. Regardless, we can certainly agree with the author that easy to source and replace batteries are few and far between in many consumer electronics these days. Perhaps new EU regulations will help?

Once you’ve selected a battery for your project, don’t forget to manage it if it’s a Li-ion cell. With great power density, comes great responsibility.

Hackaday Links Column Banner

Hackaday Links: March 9, 2025

March 9, 2025 by 9 Comments

It’s been a busy week in space news, and very little of it was good. We’ll start with the one winner of the week, Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1, which landed successfully on the Moon’s surface on March 2. The lander is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program and carries ten scientific payloads, including a GPS/GNSS receiver that successfully tracked signals from Earth-orbiting satellites. All of the scientific payloads have completed their missions, which is good because the lander isn’t designed to withstand the long, cold lunar night only a few days away. The landing makes Firefly the first commercial outfit to successfully soft-land something on the Moon, and being the first at anything is always a big deal.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: March 9, 2025” →

A stainless steel metal toaster sits on a white table. Its cord is draped artfully around to the front and the leftmost toast holding apparatus is rotated out from the front of the device like a book pulled down and out from a bookshelf.

Flat Pack Toaster Heats Up The Right To Repair

March 2, 2025 by 85 Comments

The toaster is a somewhat modest appliance that is often ignored until it stops working. Many cheap examples are not made to be easily repaired, but [Kasey Hou] designed a repairable flat pack toaster.

[Hou] originally planned to design a repairable toaster to help people more easily form an emotional attachment with the device, but found the process of disassembly for existing toasters to be so painful that she wanted to go a step further. By inviting the toaster owner into the process of assembling the appliance, [Hou] reasoned people would be less likely to throw it out as well as more confident to repair it since they’d already seen its inner workings.

Under the time constraints of the project, the final toaster has a simpler mechanism for ejecting toast than most commercial models, but still manages to get the job done. It even passed the UK Portable Appliance Test! I’m not sure if she’d read the IKEA Effect before running this project, but her results with user testing also proved that people were more comfortable working on the toaster after assembling it.

It turns out that Wikipedia couldn’t tell you who invented the toaster for a while, and if you have an expensive toaster, it might still be a pain to repair.

The FTC Take Action, Is Time Finally Up For John Deere On Right To Repair?

January 27, 2025 by 44 Comments

Over the last decade we have brought you frequent reports not from the coolest of hackerspaces or the most bleeding edge of engineering in California or China, but from the rolling prairies of the American Midwest. Those endless fields of cropland waving in the breeze have been the theatre for an unlikely battle over right to repair, the result of which should affect us all. The case of FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION, STATE OF ILLINOIS, and STATE OF MINNESOTA, v. DEERE & COMPANY  relates to the machinery manufacturer’s use of DRM to restrict the repair of its products, and holds the promise to end the practice once and for all.

This is being written in Europe, where were an average person asked to name a brand that says “America”, they might reach for the familiar; perhaps Disney, McDonalds, or Coca-Cola. These are the flag-bearers of American culture for outsiders, but it’s fair to say that none of them can claim to have built the country. The green and yellow Deere tractors on the other hand represent the current face of a company with nearly two hundred years of farming history, which by virtue of producing some of the first mass-produced plows, had perhaps the greatest individual role in shaping modern American agriculture and thus indirectly the country itself. To say that Deere is woven into the culture of rural America is something of an understatement, agricultural brands like Deere have an enviable customer base, the most loyal of any industry.

Thus while those green and yellow tractors are far from the only case of DRM protected repairability, they have become the symbolic poster child for the issue as a whole. It’s important to understand then how far-reaching it is beyond the concerns of us technology and open-source enthusiasts, and into something much more fundamental. Continue reading “The FTC Take Action, Is Time Finally Up For John Deere On Right To Repair?” →

A stack of Activation Locked MacBooks destined for the shredder in refurbisher [John Bumstead]’s workshop.

Apple IOS 18’s New Repair Assistant: Easier Parts Pairing Yet With Many Limitations

October 27, 2024 by 12 Comments

Over the years, Apple has gone all-in on parts pairing. Virtually every component in an iPhone and iPad has a unique ID that’s kept in a big database over at Apple, which limits replacement parts to only those which have their pairing with the host system officially sanctified by Apple. With iOS 18 there seems to be somewhat of a change in how difficult getting a pairing approved, in the form of Apple’s new Repair Assistant. According to early responses by [iFixit] and in a video by [Hugh Jeffreys] the experience is ‘promising but flawed’.

As noted in the official Apple support page, the Repair Assistant is limited to the iPhone 15+, iPad Pro (M4) and iPad Air (M2), which still leaves many devices unable to make use of this feature. For the lucky few, however, this theoretically means that you can forego having to contact Apple directly to approve new parts. Instead the assistant will boot into its own environment, perform the pairing and calibration and allow you to go on your merry way with (theoretically) all functionality fully accessible.

Continue reading “Apple IOS 18’s New Repair Assistant: Easier Parts Pairing Yet With Many Limitations” →

Sad clown holding melted ice cream cone

McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Gain A DMCA Exemption

October 26, 2024 by 71 Comments

An unlikely theatre for an act in the right-to-repair saga came last year in the form of McDonalds restaurants, whose McFlurry ice cream machines are prone to breakdown. The manufacturer had locked them down, and a franchisee with a broken machine had no option but to call them for an expensive repair job. iFixit and Public Knowledge challenged this with a request for a DMCA exemption from the Copyright Office, and now news emerges that this has been granted.

The exemption in question isn’t specific to McDonalds, instead it applies to retail food preparation equipment in general, which includes ice-cream machines. We’re guessing that franchisees won’t be breaking out the screwdrivers either, instead it’s likely to lower significantly the cost of a service contract for them and any other food industry operators hit with the same problem. Meanwhile any hackers who’ve picked up an old machine can now fix it themselves without breaking the law, and maybe the chances of your local Mickey D’s having no McFlurries have gone down.

This story has featured more than once on these pages, so catch up here, and here.

An Umbrella Can Teach A Thing Or Two About Product Longevity

May 10, 2024 by 30 Comments

This time of year always brings a few gems from outside Hackaday’s usual circle, as students attending industrial design colleges release their final year projects, The worlds of art and engineering sit very close together at times, and theirs is a discipline which sits firmly astride that line. This is amply demonstrated by the work of [Charlie Humble-Thomas], who has taken an everyday object, the umbrella, and used it to pose the question: How long should objects last?

He explores the topic by making three different umbrellas, none of which we are guessing resemble those you could buy. The first is not particularly durable but is completely recyclable, the second is designed entirely with repairability in mind, while the third is hugely over-engineered and designed for durability. In each case the reader is intended to think about the impact of the umbrella before them.

What strikes us is how much better designed each one is than the typical cheap umbrella on sale today, with the polypropylene recyclable one being flimsy by design, but with a simplicity missing from its commercial counterpart. The durable one meanwhile is full of CNC parts, and carbon fiber.

If you’re hungry for more student work in this vein, we recently brought you this toasty typewriter.