Hack Correlation

I was nicely asked if I could take a look at a disabled toaster unit that stopped doing its job. Post-cleanup it looks like this: The quick repair job turned out to be quite entertaining in figuring out post-mortem how the unit failed and the questionable design decisions. It involves no complicated electronics and it might help other people figure out what to look for before buying an appliance. With another layer of failures stacked on top, this unit could have set the house on fire or shocked someone. Fortunately no damages were recorded, but the deep-dive might prove interesting to some people.

My apartment has the shutters/blinds controlled via a trio of wall-mounted button panels. Here's my experience of integrating them into Home Assistant for automation and remote control. Steps: Identify the control units Buy the remote unit or reverse engineer the control signals Build a firmware for NodeMCU (ESP8266) based on ESPHome Result I've kept the intrusion to a minimum so they can be reverted without any traces: Home-Assistant panel with the three blinds actions: Control Unit The button panels have Elero stamped on them so the first thing was to go to the manufacturer's website and search for a product:  https://www.elero.de/de/produkte/jalousiesteuerungen/ The closest match seemed to be Elero VarioTec, not sure at this point if it supports remote control or not (spoiler: it doesn't).

This is an interesting piece of tech that gets a fair amount of usage. I think some everyday industrial objects hide a complex mechanical layer and present it as simplicity. To understand this piece, think of the single-use paper towel dispensers inside public toilets. This has been raised this to the next level, providing a continuous textile towel - which possibly gets afterwards washed and repaired - guessing around 50 meters in length. You pull the towel piece facing you, from the top, it allows about 30cm to be drawn out, after ~10 seconds it draws the slack (30 cm) back into the unit. This has to be experienced in order to understand the mechanical clockwork hiding inside. There are no electronics involved here. Fortunately, there was a broken unit waiting for repair, complete with refill instructions. The upper roller supplies the towels. The lower roller is the take-up roller. The green cylinder, spring-loaded, flattens up the take-up so that it's as tig...

I recently got access to a broken Siemens Dressman TJ10500. It's a pro-sumer device that helps you straighten shirts without the tedious ironing. It looks like this: The unit was described as "not heating" or "cooling rapidly". The front panel and every other feature seemed to be functioning just fine. I will describe how to tear down the unit, what can go wrong, what I did to repair mine and how well it works. Teardown To get inside the unit, there are many screws that need to be undone: around 5 at the back of the unit (except the air filter ones), two below (left side with the unit facing you). Then you need to carefully lift up the plastic trim that surrounds the LCD and controls, all around, you will have two more screws just next to the airbag. Most of the screws are Torx T20, some of them are Phillips (PH2 I think). With those undone, you can remove the left [metal sheet] panel, that gets you access to everything inside the unit. The m...

I wanted to refresh the battery in my travel laptop and decided that 70€+ might be a bit too much. So I've settled onto a 20€ battery, +1€ shipping, from Amazon. Here's the affiliate link:  http://amzn.to/2AUSIUW - but read before you decide to buy it. If you are ordering from outside Germany, returns will be difficult, as LiPo batteries fall under a special shipping clause. Second, the battery is suited for an X220 model, not X230. Third - and most importantly - the battery is a fake, with less than the advertised capacity. If you still decide to continue, then read on. Some nice people have managed to decrypt the EC firmware inside the Lenovo laptops and allow for a way to rewrite it: https://github.com/hamishcoleman/thinkpad-ec You can go through all the trouble of compiling it, but, to save you 5 minutes, here's the ready-built image that I've used myself, for X230  and the file for X230T , tested by readers: https://www.dropbox.com/s/pgd6o6gn3xkvl2e/patch...

I use a glue gun from time to time and was getting annoyed with the cable, finding a free power socket, was always in the way, ... So I bought a cheap battery-powered glue gun . It takes 7mm sticks instead of my old one - which takes 11mm ones. It also takes a little less space and has a better stand. The old one is rated at 15W while the yellow toy has 8W written on its label. No surprise in finding a standard 18650 cell in there. The glue stick feeds through a rubber o-ring. The only electronic intelligence can be found in the board at the bottom of the unit. The bottom of the board features a standard (90 degree) micro-USB socket and three LEDs. The LED diffuser is pictured bottom-left, while the hand-soldered "ON" switch is center. The bottom of the board has a TP4056 battery charger IC . It can supply up to 1A of charging current (and it does) and is produced by the NanJing Top Power Corp. While it looks like the same part number and provides sim...

This is not a "howto" as I couldn't get it to work. But if you want to know why, read on. I've been using MatterControl instead of MakerBot for my CTC Bizer (Dual) for a while know and have been really satisfied with it. However, the best results (and control) I got with a direct USB connection. Having a 2m-long USB cable dangling is not my style so I've searched for a solution. TCP-Serial bridge There are several options here, but I've settled on ESP8266 (NodeMCU) and one of these projects: https://github.com/jeelabs/esp-link https://github.com/beckdac/ESP8266-transparent-bridge https://github.com/luc-github/ESP3D So basically the ESP8266 acts as a server which then forwards everything to and from the hardware serial connection. The first two projects work (probably) fine, but MatterControl has currently (Nov 2017) an issue with virtual serial ports. I've tried both com0com and VSPE. It runs fine for a few commands (2-5) and then it fai...