repair

Circuitry, Anatomy, and Repair Tips for Common CFL Lamps

I don’t know about you, but I’m so used to the paradigm established by old-style incandescent bulbs that when one of my CFL’s “blows out,” it doesn’t even occur to me that I might be able to repair it in the garage. Or at least, it didn’t until I saw this page from Pavel Ruzicka, which does a good job of explaining the general principles of operation of CFL lamps and gives great details about their most common failure modes. Apparently, replacing a single capacitor will often do the trick. [via Hack a Day]

Continue Reading March 30th, 2011 Sean Michael Ragan12

Custom Hardware to Fix Broken iPod

While most people would simply throw away an out-of-warranty iPod with a broken play/pause button, Craig gave his a new lease on life by attaching a custom-hacked dock connector. Inside the connector, he stuffed an ATtiny 13 microcontroller with a few other passive components. Now when he pushes the button on the connector, the ATtiny […]

Continue Reading March 30th, 2011 Matt Richardson

Make: Arduino — Replace and Re-Flash a Blown Microcontroller Chip

As part of our Make: Arduino project, Riley Porter shows you how easy it is to replace a blown Atmel chip (the microcontroller heart of the Arduino) and to flash the Arduino software onto the new chip. For a few bucks and about 15 minutes of work, you can have your Arduino board back in […]

Continue Reading March 8th, 2011 Gareth Branwyn6

Espresso Machine Brain Repair

I returned home from a recent trip to a tragically non-functioning espresso machine. When I powered it on, I could hear a relay clicking, probably trying and failing to turn the pump motor on. On a commercial-grade machine like mine, a Fiorenzato Bricoletta E-61 design, this often means your microcontroller box, or brain, is kaput. […]

Continue Reading February 8th, 2011 John Edgar Park30

Repair an old pocketknife

Make: Projects community member Josh Burroughs restored his grandfather’s old pen knife, and shared his step-by-step photos and instructions with us. For a point of reference, below is what the old knife looked like before he got to work on it. Nice job, Josh!

Continue Reading January 13th, 2011 Goli Mohammadi4

The iFixit Repair Manifesto

Inspired by Mister Jalopy’s/MAKE’s Maker’s Bill of Rights and Platform 21’s Repair Manifesto, the folks at iFixit have created this lovely repair manifesto and poster. They’re on a mission to get this thing up in hackerspaces, workshops, bulletin boards, and garages the world over. They’ve even printed 1500 copies of the poster that they’re giving […]

Continue Reading November 9th, 2010 Gareth Branwyn4

Make: Projects – Magnetic HVAC return grille mount

The return grille mounting in my new house was very sloppy, with a mixture of Molly bolts, toggle bolts, and bare screws in drywall. The sloppy workmanship annoyed me, and made swapping the filter way more work than it needed to be, so I came up with this easy no-tools fix. It could easily be adapted to most steel maintenance panels.

Continue Reading October 5th, 2010 Sean Michael Ragan2