The last couple of electronics repairs I’ve written about on this blog were both quite involved. Fixing stuff doesn’t always involve crazy rabbit holes though! Here’s a quicker fix that I recently performed. Fitting in with my recent trend of repairing video capture/camera devices, this time I found a non-working NZXT Signal 4K30 HDMI capture […]
I’ve recently been on a bit of a repair kick and wanted to tell another fun repair story. I promise my blog isn’t becoming dedicated just to fixing electronics. This was an interesting story as far as parts sourcing goes though, so I thought it would be a cool one to share. Plus, you’ll get […]
There have been some past rumblings on the internet about a capacitor being installed backwards in Apple’s Macintosh LC III. The LC III was a “pizza box” Mac model produced from early 1993 to early 1994, mainly targeted at the education market. It also manifested as various consumer Performa models: the 450, 460, 466, and […]
Here’s a weird problem that I’ve never seen before, along with my eventual hardware fix. After my previous Elgato Game Capture HD60 S HDMI capture card LED repair escapades, I recently ended up trying to find another modern revision of the same device so I could dump its SPI flash chip in order to be […]
Earlier this year, there was some drama around the shutdown of the Nintendo Wii U’s online gaming. Team 0% had a goal of making sure that every level created in Super Mario Maker was beaten at least once. If you’re not familiar with Mario Maker, it’s a video game that lets you make your own […]
This post has a little bit of everything. Hardware diagnostics, some suspiciously similar datasheets from two separate Taiwan chip manufacturers, and firmware reverse engineering. Read on if that sounds like fun! Lately, I’ve been enjoying watching random electronics repair channels on YouTube. There’s something oddly satisfying about watching...
This is the final post in my blog series about getting my Chumby 8 from 2011 working on a modern 6.x Linux kernel, as opposed to the stock 2.6.28 kernel it came with. Here are links to all of the previous articles where I went into detail about the various obstacles I had to overcome: […]
As you may remember from my last post on the subject, I fixed a couple of cheap Altera USB Blaster clones in June. I found improved open-source firmware and ported it to the previously useless CH552G-based one while fixing a bug in the process, and I soldered a slower 12 MHz oscillator into the Waveshare […]
Sometime back in 2018, I tried out a fresh install of Ubuntu MATE 18.04 on one of my computers and noticed a strange problem when I attempted to install Google Chrome. I clicked the little Firefox icon in the top panel: Then I downloaded the latest Chrome .deb from Google and opened it up from […]
Way back in part 2 of this series, I first got my Chumby 8 booting into a newer Linux kernel. (Here are links to parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 if you want to read the rest of the saga). At that point early on in the project, […]