Kritik sah

After the [Slow Mo Guys] acquired a 168 TB Seagate LaCie Thunderbolt 3-based RAID storage system back in 2019 to store their video footage, they were obviously slightly miffed when suddenly it would just refuse to power up. Naturally the device was now out of warranty, the product itself no longer produced and Seagate support was less than supportive, ergo they sent the device to [Mend it Mark] for an attempted repair . At first inspection the device appeared to be basically unresponsive, with none of the four fans running and no signs of life other than a few lit LEDs on the main PCB after supplying power to it. After full disassembly and with no repair guide or schematics to go by [Mark] had to start from basics, first diagnosing whether all the power rails were turning on, which they weren’t. Eventually this led to the NXP LPC11U6x-series MCU which acts as the main power management and monitoring chip in the system. [Mark] deduced that this MCU wasn’t turning on all the...

A fun trick with a pole is to try to balance it so that it can stand on one end. This can be done in a few ways, such as by exerting a force on either end to counterbalance any force that threatens to make it fall over. The approach that [Peter Ryseck] chose was to cobble together what is effectively a flying drone for on top of a standing pole, without cheating such as by simply lifting it off the ground. Getting to the point where the drone could react quickly enough to changes in the pole’s orientation was the hardest part, as the quieter, larger propellers also have a lot more inertia. This ruled out using 10″ blades, while triple 5″ blades seemed to work well enough. For the avionics a standard quadcopter control board and software is used, with the programming such that it’ll react appropriately without causing additional instabilities. Naturally making this work took some trial and error, with issues like oscillations plaguing the system. One unexpected...

Delidding a CPU involves removing the integrated heat spreader (IHS) that’s put over the bare die and the substrate that it is mounted on. The reason for this is usually to improve cooling performance, as the IHS is effectively a small heatsink between the die and the large heatsink, adding more problematic thermal interfaces. If delidding is done improperly it can cause severe damage to the substrate, as in the case of a very nice 1.3 GHz Tualatin Pentium III CPU that [Bits und Bolts] got in an eBay lot with nasty delidding damage . With the delidding enthusiast presumably having used brute force and ignorance combined with a prying implement, around a dozen of tiny traces on the substrate got severed, requiring tedious trace repair to fix. After confirming that with the severed traces the CPU is indeed busted, enough of the soldermask is removed to make a repair. Any traces that were still good got covered with soldermask, while for the remainders the thinnest available copper...

Large prints have a risk of warping, by which we mean corners can lift off the print bed as the object sort of curls inward on itself. It’s not always due to poor filament quality or an unclean build plate. Sound like something you’ve dealt with? Check out this handy roundup to understand why it happens, and learn ways to prevent it. A big flat area with sharp corners is susceptible to warping. Breaking the footprint into a grid pattern helps distribute stresses instead of concentrating them at the corners. The reason some objects have trouble while others don’t is physics. Deposited plastic shrinks ever so slightly as it cools, and some shapes — like wide, flat surfaces with sharp corners — are worse for this than others. This sort of problem is what the guide addresses with a number of techniques. Some are simple, like turning on brims which increases an object’s footprint. This increased surface area offers more adhesion, but also increases hea...

After getting called out in the field to troubleshoot a large PV solar installation, [Derek] found himself suddenly in the midst of an arc flash, causing burns all over his face and arms. In a recent video he goes over the scenario that led up to this unfortunate event, as the holes in the Swiss cheese slowly lined themselves up, culminating in a high-current 480 VDC discharge nearly giving [Derek] a fatal embrace. Despite being a professionally trained and certified professional, being called out to diagnose a weird issue on a slightly unusual solar farm’s electrical installation already worked against him. After having spent some time doing said troubleshooting, he finally tracked down the auxiliary transformer that normally powers the low-voltage gear, along with the spicy parts that should absolutely be unpowered after flipping the breaker into the ‘off’ position. Testing for no power confirmed that the power had indeed been cut, which was when the wiring that n...

A surprising number of things we use in everyday life retain most of their design cues from their 19th century ancestors. The bicycle retains the same basic design as it had in 1890, as does the sewing machine, the toilet, the car, and of course, the keyboard and the QWERTY layout from old typewriters. But we aren’t doomed to have our technology perpetually living in the past. [Paul] wanted a keyboard designed around human hands, rather than being designed around a machine, so he built this unique split keyboard . The design of this specific keyboard went through around 50 iterations before he was comfortable with it. Other design goals here were for it to be portable, and the split nature of this certainly makes it more compact as does the use of low-profile switches. Each finger’s column is angled and spaced based on the needs of that finger, with the ring finger keys sitting higher and the index finger columns angled inward. Each thumb has access to three keys, one of wh...