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What's gone well for you recently? No matter how big or small.

cstanton

I took a couple of weeks off work, as much as you can when it's in the middle of a lockdown pandemic in the united kingdom, and I had a couple of wins myself.

blown up chip

For many years I kept hold of a computer hard drive that had died on me, of all things the microcontroller on the control board blew itself up. I had looked for a replacement control board online and at the time they cost £100+ because this was such a common problem, however recently I looked again and found that it was on ebay for £6, with a 50/50 chance of being the wrong model.

 

image

 

I took a gamble. A direct swap of the board isn't what works with this, as you can even see highlighted in the ebay listing screenshot, each drive has a BIOS chip on it flashed with the necessary settings for the platters, sectors, etc. of the hard drive. Without the right BIOS chip, you'll just get garbled data or clicking.

 

Time for a bit of desoldering and kapton tape.

 

image

 

As luck would have it, it worked! My hard drive was brought back to life, and I was able to recover my data once more.

 

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I'd say that is a good 'win' for £6 and a reflow station image

 

What's gone well for you recently?

  • I refer to this as post-it-note repairs.

     

    I write things that I need to do on post-it-notes and stick them around my environment as reminders. I also create what I call post-it-notes in my head. I find a piece of knowledge, although incomplete, I store it in my head thinking, someday I will find the missing knowledge and I can take the note down.

     

    Your bad hard drive put aside had a repair post-it-note for when you found the missing part. The fact it all came together is surprising but I found keep a post-it-note around long enough you usually can find an answer.

     

    The after school Computer Club I mentor, went from in the school classroom, to into the school basement, to into a home and into virtual with Google Hangout. The kids want to keep it going so I keep finding ways to make it happen.

  • Well done on your harddrive repair project!

     

    I have been doing a lot of work on my 'Recycle & Retrofit" project14 entry.  I have been spending a lot of time designing and printing various parts for my project, including several gears and other mechanical parts.  On the 'drive' side of my experiments, things are moving along really well.  I have stepper motors and drive electronics working and I have come up with gearing solutions that look very promising.  I had hope to come up with some clever solutions for the keeping many of the mechanical parts that produce Mr. Machines music ("This old man"), but I still have not quite got there yet.  I have been working on a simple midi player that I can use if I continue to have trouble getting the bellows/slide whistle to work well.

  • Good job.

     

    Sometimes you get a great bargain for a little investment.

     

    DAB

  • A brave repair. Well done. Usually chip damage like that is due to sudden and severe overheating from something like the current associated with a short to mains voltage. Which may be not be the chip's fault at all.

  • Great repair!  My small victory is I got the Christmas lights working.  For the record, the LED lights are no better than any other string light - just more expensive.

  • Hi Christopher,

     

    Great job with the hard disk! What reflow station did you use incidentally?

     

    My mini-success today was fixing something too, in this case remotely fixing a car rear light via video chat.

    A friend sent across this photo, he was using a bench-top supply to test it, and only some LEDs were lit..

    image

    First thing was figuring out why he was measuring strange voltages with the multimeter - it turned out that he'd left the bench supply sense terminals disconnected for years! (He's not an electrical/electronics engineer and the power supply was a hand-me-down with no instructions) so the control loop was not happy...

    image

    Anyway long story short, it was an interesting fault.. I'll leave a gap in case anyone wants to try to figure it out.. answer below.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Looking at the solder-side of the PCB, it was clear that the LEDs which were lit, were in chains of three and a resistor. There were three sets in parallel, for a total of nine lit LEDs.

    R1---LED1---LED2---LED3

    R2---LED4---LED5---LED6

    R3---LED7---LED8---LED9

     

    R1, R2 and R3 are the darker smokier resistors.

    However, the unlit LEDs were in chains of four, i.e.

    R4---LED10---LED11---LED12---LED13

    and so on.

     

    There is also a single diode on the PCB to which all the parallel chains are attached. Anyway, it turned out that there was about 5.5V across the diode.. meaning it was in a weird enough damaged state that there wasn't enough voltage to make the chains of four LEDs be able to be lit, if the PSU was set to (say) 12V. Replacing the diode fixed it of course.

  • I've been thinking about this since Jr. High School - getting my Amateur Radio operators license.

    One of the local clubs put on a one day zoom class crash course with the exam following the same day.

    Passed with %100.

    73's

    Scott

    KD9QOG

  • Good job with the hard drive!

     

    In my job, I'm a hardware engineer but for certain reason I was asked to make some low level drivers, oh men, my coding skills are awful and I had some difficulties with a RFID transceiver, then I had to make some function for read a tag, It was really hard to me because I have little experience with this kind of coding, but at the end with some help I was able to make it work and read the tag.

  • in reply to shabaz

    > Great job with the hard disk! What reflow station did you use incidentally?

     

    I likely meant rework rather than reflow, though I've seen the two used interchangeably.

     

    If I was able to access Leeds Hackspace, I would have used this:

     

    https://uk.farnell.com/tenma/21-10130-uk-eu/rework-station-900w-220v-uk-eu/dp/2062633

     

    image

     

    But because I can't... and I have a limited budget, I bought this from aliexpress:

     

    image

     

    Which did the job, though it has limits.

  • I used to have a standing desk in the office, and after months of slouching on my chair due to working from home I decided to get my posture back up and set up a standing desk at home.

    image

    Wires are still messy and there's still some stuff that need to be organized, but using a standing desk works wonders for productivity.

     

    Biggest benefit: you can feel when you're tired and need an actual break, instead of just browsing mindlessly on youtube or facebook (or ... gasp ... element14 community).