Several years ago I was a computer assembler. At that time CPU has plastic hooks to attach them on the motherboards.

But one time we had only one hook...

So we had to cut the hook in half to make two hooks and so to attach the CPU on the motherboard.

At this point I've had a wide range of repairs that saved either my rear or someone elses but the one that stands out the most in my memory was during a blizzard probably 10 years ago or more. My wife had a 99 grand caravan awd and went shopping with my 3 toddler boys at the time. The van had a random problem of a no start that the previous owner neglected to mention. My wife went inside the store for about 20 min. When she came out the van wouldn't start and the security system was setting itself. So I left work early to go see what was going on. I messed around in a foot of snow for an hour or so. I got so angry I hit the dashboard and bam! all the lights on the cluster started going bonkers. Being an auto mechanic at the time I had some tools with me so I took the cluster out of the dashboard (this was before any service bulletins for this issue on the vehicle came out). Where the main power plug went into the cluster i found a cracked solder joint on the circuit board that was randomly loosing connection. I dont have a clue how i found it but i did!! When I got back to the shop I uploaded the issue to alldata and another program we had at the time then found out it was a huge problem that model year but no one had the fix for it until I threw it up. Probably not my best story but I was very proud of myself that day for saving my family!!

It is the correct time to share my repair experience which may not be the best but important for myself happened during last year Christmas time.

I bought a decorative serial light for my home from a shop near my office on that day my church Christmas Carrol was planned.

About 5.00 pm I assembled and mount it on my house and switch on it. it was not working but it was working when I bought.

so I had decided to fix it on my own with my soldering set before the Carrol visits.

Ooh! Yeah! I fixed it and happily show it to my friends.

Jeffry

I repaired a 1950’s roberts radio I picked up at a car boot about 5 years ago - knocked the transistors to dislodge some whiskers and still listening to radio 4 on it today  

I damaged/popped a cold solder joint on an electrical connector on an ebike battery while replacing the outer plastic case. The case included a new connector but the four metal tabs were not overmolded into a single connector. Rather it required soldering two tabs correctly spaced onto one wire, another two on another wire, and then assembling the tabs into the plastic connector body. After much wasted time and serious frustration I made a jig of tongue depressors and hot glue to hold everything while soldering.

Not really a repair but rather a fix. We had a small pump at home that would be used to pump water to an overhead tank. This is 1996 in the north of India and things were pretty basic.

My grandfather had to climb up two flights of stairs to get the status of the tank which included: filling? half filled or full?

I rigged up a water level sensor using the 555 timer to indicate if probes were submerged. I used a 4 way switch to select between the line for water in, half and full. Fourth was a test line which would be called a reference or default test.

It was useful until the market became flooded with cheap water flow alarms.

Thankyou,

I do get a fair few people bringing me things to fix  

I have since contacted the manufacturer of the telescope to advise them how I was able to fix my brothers scope, and I know the fault is a common issue from reading the astronomy forums. The manufacturer has actually asked me not to publish the dumped image as they do not want their firmware copied. being honest tho, i would like to publish it so other people could fix their own telescopes mainly because i feel the manufacturer was so unhelpful and was just using the fault as an opportunity to take even more money from their customers. Its not as if these mounts and telescopes come cheap.

while fixing the mount I was also in contact with the UK's largest astronomy shop and their technicians, these guys was at least trying to be helpful, and also a more local small astronomy 2nd hand dealer. I have told both of these how I repaired it but have not given them the firmware. The large store was quite amazed how I did it and have never heard of someone able to repair the fault before.

The local store has actually asked me to fix one of their mounts for them, they have a larger mount by the same manufacturer with what they believe is a similar issue

They are going to drop it to me after Christmas for me to take a look at for them

I am pretty sure I can do it the same way as most of the manufacturers mounts use the same software to update their telescopes

I also now know when the updater completes it does lock the kinetis chip to protect the chip from being read so the manufacturer really does not want people to get their hands on it.

during the final captures i was able to capture all the software for the telescope, including all the star mapping data, location data everything, i have the complete images of both the kinetis chip which is really used just for the bootloader and update control and the extended memory flash chip which stores all the star and location data and configuration settings etc. each type of data is stored at specific memory locations and each block of data has calculated checksums. I have figured out each location and the checksum routines, the checksum is actually a modified crc16 checksum and can be easily reversed so i wrote a small routine to do it

As for releasing the firmware on the astronomy forums so people can repair their own mounts, I havent done this yet as I really dont understand where I would stand legally and could I get in trouble for releasing it or not in its raw image format decrypted.

Im sure I am fine explaining how I have done it so others can follow what I have done but as for releasing the actual firmware I think would be a bit of a grey area and I am a bit concerned that i might get in trouble if i was to release it.

Wow, an impressive amount of reverse-engineering in your example. Also you have the satisfaction you can tell the manufacturer (politely) that it's a shame they didn't design mount version 1 properly but you still don't need their upgraded mount.

Another side of me thinks with effort and self-taught skills like that you'll never be out of work or demand !

Feel free to post some blogs on Element14 about any future teardowns or hardware hacks you get up to, they'll make good reading I'm sure

I take my hat off to you for this 'temporary' fix . If only manufacturer's adopted your design philosophy (with accessibility to the controller, relays and wiring) we'd all be in a much better place when it comes to repairing stuff. A big start would be running the appliance controller off a standard DC PSU along with an auxiliary feed input. IMO currently the board only costs a few percent of the overall retail price.

I won't say best, but the most memorable and significant was when I was getting the string lights ready for the holiday season, Diwali for us, and was trying to fix a couple of non working lights, while I was doing that I taught my grandma how the string lights circuit works and she wanted to help me so she started doing the smae thing as I was, that is checking for continuity between terminals using the DMM, she found a spot and told me, I told her that was it and that soldering would fix it, she didn't believe me, so once the string lights worked after the quick soldering fix, she was completely amazed and fascinated. That holiday whoever visited us got to hear the string lights chronicle from her. I think that event is what summarises to her what engineering is!