As a result of the European Union’s push for greater repairability of consumer devices like smartphones, Apple sees itself forced to make the batteries in the iPhone user-replaceable by 2027. Reportedly, this has led Apple to look at using electroadhesion rather than conventional adhesives which require either heat, isopropyl alcohol, violence, or all of the above to release. Although details are scarce, it seems that the general idea would be that the battery is wrapped in metal, which, together with the inside of the metal case, would allow for the creation of a cationic/anionic pair capable of permanent adhesion with the application of a low-voltage DC current.

This is not an entirely wild idea. Tesa has already commercialized it in the electrical debonding form of its Debonding on Demand product. This uses a tape that’s applied to one side of the (metal) surfaces, with a 5 bar pressure being applied for 5 seconds. Afterwards, the two parts can be released again without residue as shown in the above image. This involves applying a 12V DC voltage for 60 seconds, with the two parts afterward removable without force.

Tesa markets this right alongside the pull tab adhesive strips which are currently all the rage in smartphones, with the opinions on pull strips during battery replacement strongly divided. A bottle of IPA is always good to have nearby when a pull tab inevitably snaps off and you have to pry the battery loose. In that regard electroadhesion for debonding would make life significantly easier since the times when batteries were not a structural part of smartphones are unlikely to return no matter how much we might miss them.

We covered electroadhesion previously, as you can make just about anything stick to anything, including biological tissues to graphite and metal, with potentially interesting applications in robotics and medicine.

Another day, another crop of newly minted minimal astronauts, as Blue Origin’s New Shepard made a successful suborbital flight this week. Everything seemed to go according to plan, at least until right at the end, when an “unexpected foliage contingency” made astronaut egress a little more complicated than usual. The New Shepard capsule had the bad taste to touch down with a bit of West Texas shrubbery directly aligned with the hatch, making it difficult to find good footing for the platform used by the astronauts for the obligatory “smile and wave” upon exiting. The Blue Origin ground crew, clad in their stylish black and blue outfits that must be murderously impractical in the West Texas desert, stamped down the brush to place the stairway, but had a lot of trouble getting it to sit straight. Even with the impromptu landscaping, the terrain made it tough to get good footing without adding random bits of stuff to prop up one leg, an important task considering that one of the new astronauts was a 90-year-old man. It seems pretty short-sighted not to have adjustable legs on the stairway, but there it is.

Over the years, this space has recorded the closure of multiple brick-and-mortar surplus stores in a sort of slow-motion death spiral. While each one is a loss to the hobbyist community, this one hits close to home because it’s the only one we’ve actually visited in person. “You-Do-It Electronics Center” was a fixture of the Boston surplus scene for 75 years, a remnant of a time when dozens of major manufacturers made homes in the suburbs within the I-95/Route 128 loop — all roads in Massachusetts have at least two names. Digital Equipment Corp., Wang, Data General, and Polaroid, not to mention defense contractors like Raytheon and institutions like MIT and Lincoln Laboratories, all contributed to the abundance of electronic surplus, and a lot of it ended up on the shelves at You-Do-It’s enormous store. We remember spending an afternoon there and feeling a little like being at Disneyworld — there was way too much to see in just one day, and you could easily spend a lot of money. The announcement doesn’t state a reason for the closure, but we’ll guess that it’s just not possible for the owners to keep up with the decreasing demand for random bits and pieces of electronics. Farewell, You-Do-It, and thanks for the memories.

If you enjoy working on vehicles as much as we do, you’re sure to have run into a job that would have been a lot easier if you only had access to the original shop manuals for the car. We’ve been in that boat before and been sorely tempted to shell out whatever the manufacturer demands for a paper copy of the manual, price be damned. Or, there’s Operation CHARM, or Collection of High-quality Auto Repair Manuals, which is exactly what it sounds like — an online archive of scanned manuals for virtually every car or truck made between 1982 and 2013. We’ve checked out the Toyota offerings, and while navigation is a bit idiosyncratic, the scan quality is pretty good. What’s really nice is that you can download a zip file with all the good stuff for offline use. At least theoretically; the servers were overloaded every time we tried. It’s hard to say what the rights situation is with this material or how long it will be before a takedown request, so strike while the iron is hot.

Here’s another con to add to your schedule: Teardown 2024. Scheduled for the weekend on June 21 in Portland, Oregon, Teardown looks like it’ll be a pretty good time. The CFP link is still active, so it looks like they’re still accepting proposals.

And finally, it’s the silliest toolchain we’ve ever seen: Compilerfax. First, print a hard copy of your C code, then fax it to a special phone number using a phone shaped like a hamburger. A Raspberry Pi will decode the fax and do OCR on it, submit the code to GCC for compilation, and generate a report with the output, if any. The Pi then calls back the original fax number and prints the report. Sadly but wisely, this service isn’t publically accessible, as it lives only on the private phone system of the York Hackerspace in the UK. But if you’re going to EMFCamp next week, you just might be able to give it a whirl.

[Sharad Shankar] repaired a broken TV by swapping out the cracked and malfunctioning image panel for a new one. Now, part-swapping is a great way to repair highly integrated modern electronics like televisions, but the real value here is something else. He documented his fix but the real useful part is his observations and guidance on how to effectively look for donor devices when the actual model of donor device can’t be found.

The usual approach to fixing a device by part swapping is to get one’s hands on two exact same models that are broken in different ways. But when it comes to consumer electronics with high turnovers — like televisions — it can be very difficult to actually locate any particular model once it’s no longer on shelves. [Sharad Shankar]’s broken TV was a 65″ TCL R646 purchased in 2021, and searching for a second 65″ TCL R646 was frankly like looking for a needle in a haystack. That’s when he got a visit from the good ideas fairy.

The first insight he had was that he didn’t actually need the exact same model of TV as a donor, he just needed the same display panel. The second insight was that TV manufacturers are absolutely using the same panels across different models of device. So he expanded his search to include similar TV models by the same manufacturer, hoping they contained the same display as the one he needed to replace.

This is more difficult than it may sound, because service manuals or similar low-level information about components in particular models of TV are not easy to find. In the end, [Sharad Shankar] did the following:

1. Collect all the specs for his (cracked screen) TV.
2. Find similar models made by the same manufacturer, preferably within a year or so.
3. Compare the specs and make a short list of models that have the same screen size, screen technology, and display features as the original. (Features unrelated to the display can change.)
4. Expand the search for a donor device to include these other potentials.

As luck would have it, he was able to locate a potential donor device on eBay thanks to his expanded search list. 75$ later, [Sharad Shankar] had the donor home and opened up to reveal some encouraging similarities between it and the broken original. A little part-swapping later, he once again had a working TV!

This method did require a bit of finger-crossing since it was impossible to be entirely certain that the parts would be compatible, but as far as calculated risks and educated guesses go, it was a solid play.

Keeping in mind that technology is designed and created by other humans and that certain things therefore are more likely than others can provide key insights when doing repair work or reverse engineering. Angles are usually clean divisions of 90°, and if calipers say 3.99 inches then it was probably actually designed as and intended to be 4.00 inches. And, as [Sharad Shankar] observed, consumer electronics like televisions are not completely redesigned and remanufactured from scratch with every model and release. Keep it in mind the next time you’re having trouble tracking down a part.

Some might consider a broken ribbon cable to be unsalvagable. They’re delicate and fragile as can be, and sometimes just fussing with them further is enough to cause additional damage. However, with the right set of skills, it’s sometimes possible to achieve the unthinkable. As [Master Liu] demonstrates, you can indeed repair a broken ribbon cable, even a tiny one.

The video concerns a ribbon cable linked to a Touch ID fingerprint sensor from an Apple device. It’s common to break these ribbon cables when repairing a phone, and doing so causes major problems. The Touch ID device is paired with the host phone, and cannot easily be replaced. Thus, repair is justified if at all possible.

The repair involves scraping back the outer coating on the two sections of ribbon cable to reveal the copper pads underneath. The copper is then coated with flux and solder to prepare them to be rejoined. Ultra-fine strands of wire are used to join the individual traces. Then, the repaired section is coated in some kind of sealant or epoxy to hold the joint together and protect it from failing again. The theory is easy, it’s just the execution that’s hard.

Ribbon cable repair is becoming one of our favorite topics of late. Sometimes you just need a steady hand and the guts to have a go. Video after the break.

Apple is fairly notorious for building devices that are difficult to repair, but with the right tools it’s often not completely impossible to circumvent some of their barriers. As they say, every lock has a key. [dosdude1] has wanted a specific M1 development board for a while now and has been slowly piecing together everything he needs to cobble one together, and finally got this unit running despite many roadblocks put in his way by Apple.

The development kit is a Developer Transition Kit  or “DTK” meant for developers during Apple’s transition from Intel chips to their own in-house ARM-based M1 platform. This particular version is in a Mac Mini form factor but it has a few hurdles to clear before it powers on. First, the board was cut in a critical location that shorted out many of the PCB layers, so this had to be carefully filed down to remove the shorts. It was also missing a few tiny surface mount components and a NAND chip, but these were scavenged from other scrapped parts and assembled into a fully working machine.

There are a number of other non-physical problems to solve here as well, too. Apple coded their NAND chips to work with specific WiFi modules so if these aren’t programmed to work together the computer will get stuck in a boot loop. But with that and a few other details out of the way [dosdude1] finally has his DTK up and running in a 2018 Mac Mini chassis, right down to the working power LEDs. We’ve seen all kinds of PCB damage before (although not often quite this intricate) and even PCBs repaired that were snapped in half.

Thanks to [CodeAsm] for the tip!

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.