Hack Correlation

I've bought a CTC dual from ebay.de a couple of weeks ago, for significantly less than 400E, shipped from Germany. Here are my experiences with it, as a complete beginner. This will be a text-only post, if there is enough interest I will post some pictures and pictorial guides later. It's a FlashForge clone which is in itself a Replicator Dual (2X?) clone. It has a heated bed, dual extruder, wood panels and acceptable build quality and components. TL;DR version: - print simple objects no bigger than 5(W)x5(D)x2(H)cm if you want no issues - install a glass plate on top of the bed - use masking tape on the bed - experiment with temperatures for each new filament - install sailfish - pre-order 40mm cooling fans - install active cooling - cut polycarbonate covers to size to keep heat inside In the box The printer came pre-assembled, saving about one week of fiddling. It also came (mostly) calibrated, I just did a basic plate leveling, which might have not been nec...

This is a teardown and 'repair' of a common type of e-smoke cigarette. If you are reading this in the future (say, ten years from now, 2025) smoking is a type of pleasure that's dying in this year - 2015. It's an expensive drug (5-20%of monthly income) that takes a bit worse than soap and makes everything stink. It's still legal while other drugs (THC-based)  are still illegal. It forms a strange addiction to this bad smell and lack of brain oxygenation that augments alcohol consumption. Well, lack of oxygen will strengthen any other drug or high, but can be had even cheaper while trying to stay underwater in a sink. If you are underage and you are reading this then probably the parental filter set on the router has failed. Smoking is bad, m'kay? If you are reading this in the future, some people here are trying to get rid of this so-called nasty habit and enrich their gadget profile. This means that the thing they are trying to replace WITH has a microco...

This is a quick update to some projects that I've been working on. My txtr Beagle PC software fork has received an updated version. Changes and tutorial here: https://github.com/ligius-/jbeagle In Germany youtube gets to screw us twice - most music videos cannot be viewed and ads are shown on 90% of the videos. The iOS and Android youtube players cannot skip those ads. Here's my solution to that - buy a TL-WR841N router and give it as a present to some close friend in another country. It's a decent router and my custom firmware adds VPN server support so you can get rid of those pesky ads and private 'law' agencies monitoring* : https://github.com/ligius-/WR841N-VPN Afterwards just set up a normal VPN connection - works with Windows, iOS and Android, out of the box. For Android I recommend VpnROOT instead of the stock feature. *Those so-called agencies are private companies monitoring your traffic for 'illegal' content. They have automated softw...

I was asked to try to repair an Apple MacBook Air A1466 (mid 2012) that has received a cup of tea. When I first heard of the water damage I requested the user to stop using the laptop immediately and take the battery out. However, the laptop was still put in use for a few weeks after which it failed. Had the advice been heeded the extent of the damage would probably not have been so high. The symptoms were: some keys not working, including the power key, screen kept blanking out or flashing colors, laptop shut down by itself. Getting inside is pretty easy, if you have the right tools. You need several strange screwdrivers that can be purchased from iFixit: Most of the damage seems to be located in the upper left corner: Screen (LVDS) cable has a few corroded pins, the power regulator next to the right seems to have been cooking some tea: The screen connector on the mainboard looks heavily corroded: Obviously the water detection sticker has been triggered to a ...

I'm running a social experiment to see how many views would get a post targeted to a different audience. This hack is focused on Amazon's Kindle line since it does not allow changing the date via the settings, but it's applicable to all Android devices. I would suggest having a cheap tablet just for the game, since the clock will be way off. Also, connecting to WiFi will, in some cases, update the clock. The preparations will take around 15 minutes, only once, afterwards it should take around 20 seconds to get your life back. Actually, if you are playing this game, you are never getting your life back. Edit - quicker way: change the date 1 day after, go back to the game, see 5 lives restored, change back 1 day, go back to the game. What you need: Kindle Fire or Kindle Fire HDX rooted Terminal Emulator  - install the store version if possible or sideload the apk Hacker's Keyboard - not needed but highly recommended. Preparations: Disable WiFi to b...

As seen from the previous related post , adding data output to MS8229 does not take very long and it might prove useful at times. However, some people might undertake that modification - which for safety reasons I don't recommend - so here you get to see a proper isolated connection. First, the hand-drawn schematic: Some optocouplers and resistors were scrounged from crappy USB chargers. You need 2x optocouplers and 2x or 3x resistors. The left dotted side signifies the UART converter while the right side the multimeter. The circuit above has the added benefit that it draws no power if the data output is not connected to a computer -> if no USB is plugged into the converter the first optocoupler does not turn on, yielding no power to the second one. It also does the necessary inversion of the signal by weakly pulling RX to GND at all times (through the 3.3k resistor) while turning on the second optocoupler will pull the signal to VCC (3.3V). The resistors are rando...

I bought a Mastech MS8229 multimeter for a decent price because it offered a few compelling extra features which would be nice to have - sound meter and luxmeter. I also knew from this post that data logging was possible to 'bolt on' afterwards. Short review TL;DR: I would likely not recommend this meter for the money it currently retails for (45E). It has a really slow autoranging, especially on the Ohms scale, taking 2-3s to read a resistor. The input protection is almost inexistent, which is not a huge issue if you don't intend to use it at high voltages. It has a multi-purpose mode of resistance, diode, continuity and capacitance - which defaults to resistance. I am using continuity mode 90% than any other mode so I would have liked that to be the default or to have it's separate switch position. The rotary switch cannot be moved without holding the device with the other hand and it frequently goes between positions. While in that erroneous mode you have ...

Since I am lately doing contract work mostly from home I need to set up the environment just right. Sitting for 8-10 hours straight at a desk is unhealthy and a lot of my colleagues have motorized desks that go for 1700E (~2000USD) a pop. I just bought an Ikea SKARSTA desk that’s raised and lowered via a manually actuated crank, old-school style. The price for the base was 170E (x1.13 for USD) plus another 30E for the base plate. The motorized version (BEKANT) retails for 500E which means by doing a conversion we can save around >300E - 340$ at the time of writing, likely to be more by the time you read this article.

Being on the hunt for the cheapest wireless temperature and humidity sensors led me to FreeTec  NC-7345-675 - sold by pearl.de at the fair price of 10E, though I might have paid even less for them. The requirements were: multi-channel, have at least 0.5C accuracy and provide humidity readout. Rolling your own can easily cost more than that. The sensors pair with this weather station . The goal is to store all the data on an SBC and provide a nice HTML frontend with long-term statistics and heating automation. EDIT: blogger removed without warning all the newlines from my code, I had to redo some of those Hardware The first step is to open up the sensors and see what we are dealing with. With the main board detached from the zebra display connector, we can see the coil antenna at the top and the wires for the humidity sensor running at the bottom right. Judging by the traces going from the SW-CH part directly into the chip it seems there is no way to force addition...

Do you feel efficient enough when using Windows? Here are some pieces of software that I use and have saved me years. Total Commander I've been using this for more than 10 years, think of it as Midnight Commander (mc) on steroids, for Windows. Screenshots of main features here: http://www.ghisler.com/screenshots/en/ It's practically the first thing I install when I need to work on a machine. Scenarios: copy stuff around from one drive/ftp/share to another, queuing (F2) operations along the way view any files (F3) in ascii/unicode/hex, edit them (F4) search in current folder (Alt+F7), much faster than using an IDE for source files archive old files (Alt+F5, Alt+o) and unpack multiple archives (insert, Alt+F9), in background compare directories (Shift+F2), including by content (Alt+c, y) like different GIT repositories diff selected files, including binary/hex (Alt+f, y) virtual folder support for FTP/Samba/nfs shares, adb, ext2fs, deleted files ... vi...

I had these pictures lying around, they might be of help to someone. So, in no particular order: MSI GT60 2PC mini-review, inside photo and getting the Windows 8 key from BIOS Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6230 SMA socket repair Random Toshiba laptop reflow attempt

This is a short article on a lighter note. I got a broken keyboard (from boxes with  DOA stuff) with a few keys that were not working. I've opened the keyboard up and marked the keys that were not working, you can see a slight red marker trace in the picture below: The key circuitry is a sandwich of three flexible plastic layers: top and bottom with conductive traces and a middle one for isolation. Only the bottom one was broken. Using a continuity meter the breakage was traced to an area near the connector. As a heads-up, the measured resistance for this type of traces is 5-10 ohms/cm, so for a strip/trace longer than 20 cm the meter might not beep anymore. I had some silver paste sitting around unused, so I covered the broken traces with that.  Some shaking required.... ...after shaking all the silver flakes/powder should be evenly distributed. I don't think they mention this anywhere. I believe a bottle of that stuff is around 15E for 5ml, but shou...

Thinking that I've had the process in hand, I've tried reballing a PS3 video chip. I'm not sure it was the video chip at fault since the person who gave it to me had attempted a reflow on it, transforming the YLOD (yellow light of death) into a GLOD (green one). Setup was pretty similar to the one in the previous post; started with a light warming (100-120C) of the complete board to provide uniform thermal expansion and remove moisture: However the chip proved to be a beast and my hot air gun was raising the temperature too slowly to be safe.  I began looking for items that are a similar size and shape in order to make a template for the gun. This screwdriver accessory proved to be the best match. The layout was started by wrapping some gardening wire around the magnetizer and holding it in place with some masking tape. Not removing the tape proved to be a mistake when temperatures of 400C were involved. The wired frame was then wrapped in food-grade a...

Some time ago I wrote about a reflow I did on a broken laptop: http://hackcorrelation.blogspot.de/2014/01/medion-md97900-laptop-teardown-and.html The unit worked fine for ~6 months, after which it failed again with the same symptom: no video. It sat unused for one year but then I received a PS3 with the YLOD symptom. This prompted me to order a BGA reballing set from eBay and attempt to fix them both. The PS3 reball will be in a part 2 of this series. This is not a guide, just a journal describing the mistakes I've made during the process. The video chip is the plagued NF-G6150 , also used in the HP DV6000. The laptop still has decent performance when paired with an SSD, for today's standards. The area around the chip was masked with Kapton tape: Then 'shielded' with food-grade aluminium: I had a goose-neck-style phone cradle sitting around which provided a stable hands-free holder for the hot-air gun. The chip was painted with a black marke...