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.
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.
Slightly less impressive was Intuitive Machines’ attempt at a landing a day later. Their NOVA-C robotic lander Athena managed a somewhat controlled landing, but the spacecraft is lying on its side rather than upright, a surprisingly common failure mode for recent lunar landings. Also in the failure category is the loss of the world’s first private asteroid mining mission, as well as SpaceX Starship test flight 8, which ended in spectacular fashion this week as Starship exploded soon after booster separation. As usual, Scott Manley has the best analysis of the incident, which seemed to involve a fire in the engine bay that led to a rapid loss of thrust from four of its six engines, and sent the spacecraft tumbling before tearing itself apart. The only good news from the flight was the third successful catch of the returning booster by the chopsticks, which just never gets old.
What does get old is stories about printer manufacturers and their anti-consumer hijinks, especially when it involves one of the only manufacturers who wasn’t playing the “buy our consumables or we brick it” game. In addition to just about every other printer maker, Brother now stands accused of sending firmware up to printers that turns off functionality if non-OEM cartridges are used. The accusations come from Louis Rossman, well-known for his right-to-repair advocacy and, ironically, long-time proponent of Brother printers as least likely to be bricked. His accusation that “Brother is now among the rest of them” is based on a pretty small sample of affected users, and a self-selected one at that, so take that with the requisite amount of salt. For their part, Brother denies the claim, stating simply that “Brother firmware updates do not block the use of third-party ink in our machines.” They don’t go much beyond that by way of an explanation of what’s happening to the users reporting problems other than to say that the users may be confused by the fact that “we like to troubleshoot with Brother Genuine supplies.” What the real story is is anyone’s guess at this point, and the best advice we can offer is either to avoid printers altogether, or just buy the cheapest one you can get and harvest it for parts once the starter cartridges are empty.
If like us you’ve accumulated a large collection of physical media films and TV shows to while away the long dark days of a post-apocalyptic nightmare where Netflix and Hulu are but a distant memory, you might want to rethink your strategy. Some DVD aficionados have found a troubling trend with “DVD rot,” especially with discs manufactured by Warner Brothers Discovery between 2006 and 2008. It’s not clear what’s going on, but it looks like the polycarbonate cover is delaminating from the inner Mylar layer, resulting in cloudy areas that obscure the data. Warner is aware of the problem and will replace defective discs with the same title if possible, or exchange it for a title of like value if the original is no longer available. We’re dismayed that this defect probably includes our beloved Looney Tunes collection, but on the upside, now we have an excuse to sit through forty straight hours of cartoons.
And finally, if you were a NASA rocket engineer in the 1960s, skipping leg day wasn’t an option. That’s because the Saturn V full-stack shake test on the Apollo program was a very hands-on feet-on process. The shake test was performed to make sure nothing was loose on the stack, and that it would be able to withstand not only the shaking induced by those five massive F-1 engines, but also the occasional hurricane that Florida is famous for. To get the rocket shaking, engineers sat on the deck of the gantry with their legs bridging the gap and their feet up against the side of the service module and gave it all they had. Other engineers literally backed them up, to provide something to push against, while another team on the uppermost platform used a rope to play tug-of-war with the command module. They were able to get the stack moving pretty good, with a meter or so of deflection at the escape tower. It does raise the question, though: what would they have done if the test failed?
We used to say that fixing something was easier than bringing up a design for the first time. After all, the thing you are fixing, presumably, worked at one time or another. These days, that’s not always true as fixing modern gear can be quite a challenge. Watching [Ken’s] repair of an old 1955 Silvertone radio reminded us of a simpler time. You can watch the action on the video below.
If you’ve never had the pleasure of working on an AM radio, you should definitely try it. Some people would use an amplifier to find where the signal dies out. Others will inject a signal into the radio to find where it stops. A good strategy is to start at the volume control and decide if it is before or after that. Then split the apparently bad section roughly in half and test that portion—sort of a hardware binary search. Of course, your first step should probably be to verify power, but after that, the hunt is on.
There’s something very satisfying about taking a dead radio and then hearing it come to life on your bench. In this case, some of the problems were from a previous repair.
Shortwave radio has a charm all its own: part history, part mystery, and a whole lot of tech nostalgia. The Hallicrafters S-53A is a prime example of mid-century engineering, but when you get your hands on one, chances are it won’t be in mint condition. Which was exactly the case for this restoration project by [Ken’s Lab], where the biggest challenge wasn’t fried capacitors or burned-out tubes, but a stubborn band selector switch that refused to budge.
What made it come to this point? The answer is: time, oxidation, and old-school metal tolerances. Instead of forcing it (and risking a very bad day), [Ken]’s repair involved careful disassembly, a strategic application of lubricant, and a bit of patience. As the switch started to free up, another pleasant surprise emerged: all the tubes were original Hallicrafters stock. A rare find, and a solid reason to get this radio working without unnecessary modifications. Because some day, owning a shortwave radio could be a good decision.
Once powered up, the receiver sprang to life, picking up shortwave stations loud and clear. Hallicrafters’ legendary durability proved itself once before, in this fix that we covered last year. It’s a reminder that sometimes, the best repairs aren’t about drastic changes, but small, well-placed fixes.
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.
Coming straight to the point: [Ron Hinton] is significantly braver than we are. Or maybe he was just in a worse situation. His historic Acer K385s laptop suffered what we learned is called vinegar syndrome, which is a breakdown in the polarizers that make the LCD work. So he bit the bullet and decided to open up the LCD stack and replace what he could.
Nothing says “no user serviceable parts inside” quite like those foil-and-glue sealed packages, but that didn’t stop [Ron]. Razor blades, patience, and an eye ever watchful for the connectors that are seemingly everywhere, and absolutely critical, got the screen disassembled. Installation of the new polarizers was similarly fiddly.
In the end, it looks like the showstopper to getting a perfect result is that technology has moved on, and these older screens apparently used a phase correction layer between the polarizers, which might be difficult to source these days. (Anyone have more detail on that? We looked around and came up empty.)
This laptop may not be in the pantheon of holy-grail retrocomputers, but that’s exactly what makes it a good candidate for practicing such tricky repair work, and the result is a readable LCD screen on an otherwise broken old laptop, so that counts as a win in our book.
Determining that a cable has a broken conductor is the easy part, but where exactly is the break? In a recent video, [Richard] over at the Learn Electronics Repair channel on YouTube gave two community-suggested methods a shake to track down a break in a proprietary charging cable. The first attempt was to run a mains power detector along the cable to find the spot, but he didn’t have much luck with that.
The second method involved using the capacitance of the wires, or specifically treating two wires in the cable as the electrodes of a capacitor. Since the broken conductor will be shorter, it will have less capacitance, with the ratio theoretically allowing for the location of the break in the wire to be determined.
In the charging cable a single conductor was busted, so its capacitance was compared from both sides of the break and compared to the capacitance of two intact conductors. The capacitance isn’t much, on the order of dozens to hundreds of picofarads, but it’s enough to make an educated guess of where the rough location is. In this particular case the break was determined to be near the proprietary plug, which ruled out a repair as the owner is a commercial rental shop of e-bikes.
To verify this capacitor method, [Richard] then did it again on a piece of mains wire with a deliberate cut to a conductor. This suggested that it’s not a super accurate technique as applied, but ‘good enough’. With a deeper understanding of the underlying physics it likely can be significantly more accurate, and it’s hardly the only way to find broken conductors, as commentators to the video rightly added.
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