Read Bruce Sterling’s Generation Generator. Do it.

How is it possible that something as technologically advanced as a laptop PC or MP3-player fails completely after a year or two through something as technologically “dumb” as a barrel power connector or audio jackplug?

This doesn’t just happen to the cheap Chinese crap that you find everywhere. This happens to brand-name products from the likes of Sony and Apple as well.

I open up a lot of products, both to fix them and for educational purposes. Because I have a special interest in electronics, most of them are consumer electronics like mobile phones, MP3-players or laptops. Most of them come to me because they have been declared “broken” by their owner. Most of them still work fine. Only the connector that charges the gizmo (or some other important connector) is broken.
Either, 80-90% of all consumer electronics on the market today are designed by Electrical Engineers and Industrial Designers who are “mechanically challenged” or this is done on purpose. I’m not big on conspiracy theories, and the truth is probably somewhere in between. Indeed, planned obsolescence has been around for quite some time; but I’m not completely sure that’s what’s causing this. What I’m saying is: I can’t tell for sure if this is done on purpose or not. If it is, this is a major deliberate cause of e-waste. Either way, this needs to be fixed – both on micro and macro levels.

Here’s what happens, from a consumer standpoint: You buy a brand new, brand-name laptop and use it carefully for about 3 years. Some bits and pieces fall off. A keyboard-key disappears in the vacuum. The warranty expires. After a while, it won’t always charge when you plug in the power. Sometimes you have to “wiggle” the plug a little. After a few months more, it completely stops charging. With no other source of power, you discard it as broken. “It’s probably too expensive to have it repaired anyway. And I wanted a new one as well.”, you tell yourself as you walk to the store.

A few years back, the same happened to your MP3-player, but that time, the sound got all glitchy. For most people, this is fine. The product got old, had its defects and then died a simple and painful death in some shoebox.

Let me take a laptop that I fixed recently (in about half an hour) as an example. Here’s what happens on the inside:

The above is a close-up of the motherboard (PCB) of the computer near the power connector (“barrel”). Note that the whole picture is about 4cm across. There are 4 connections from the barrel power receptacle to the PCB, all of which are solder connections. Three of them are on the edge of the PCB. One is further from the edge. This is the connection that actually transfers the power that the machine runs on and charges itself with.

The plug that went into the barrel is about 7cm long. The three solder connections on the edge of the PCB, in this example, function as a sort of hinge when force or momentum is applied to the barrel connector. Nothing in the construction of the enclosure helped relieve this force. With the distance of the “far” solder joint to the “hinge” being quite small, the arm of the momentum applied by the plug (7cm) means the force is amplified about 10x. Solder (a mixture of Tin and Lead and/or Copper) is quite brittle. You can probably guess what happens next.

The above is an extreme close-up of the solder joint in question. You can clearly see a gap between the solder (silvery) and the copper of the PCB (light green).The gap is tiny, but big enough to make the whole machine essentially worthless.

Let me share the easy, “micro-scale”, after-the-fact fix. I’ll post another article with design considerations for these kind of issues. The DIY-fix is easy: There is enough copper left beside the solder joint, ready to be scraped off and soldered again:

With this fix, the laptop has now been in use again for about 3 months without problems.

I hope this blog post can function as a guide for people with the same or similar problems. I also hope it can serve as a helpful critique of the industrial design of contemporary consumer electronics. These problems are easily avoided by properly designing these critical components of the gadgets that we use every day. A lot of environmental problems can be solved if the longevity of our electronics can be extended with these simple fixes. Again: Why should something as technologically complex as a laptop PC fail on something as simple as a power plug?

Although Skiffy is one of the leading suppliers of plastic tidbits, they don’t have 3D-CAD models of their parts. So I had to scrape the dimensions from their site, put them in a spreadsheet, and load them into SolidWorks. I learned quite a lot of stuff from this, so I’ll also share the process:

1. Get the HTML-source of the table from Skiffy’s web site and feed that into this handy-dandy tool.
2. Save the CSV as a textfile and open it in OpenOffice (or Excel, if you’re into that).
3. Use Find/replace and some regex to clean up the table and fix “,”or”.”-problems.
4. Get this nice plugin for SW and install it (you have to “buy” it for free to download), or use SW’s native Design Table tool (but you’ll need to have Excel installed, which I didn’t)
5. SPN’s tool works by right clicking in the model space and selecting Add/edit ConfigurationDesigner Spreadsheet, which took some time to figure out.
6. ConfigurationDesigner didn’t recognize new dimensions automatically, so I had to add them manually by their name (e.g. D1@Sketch1)
7. Add your data to the sheet.
8. Click Update to model and get some tea; with ±400 configs, this takes a while.

I’m probably not the only one using Skiffy’s awesome products on a regular basis, so I’ll share the part with you. It has mate-references for easy usage in assemblies, and the complete part number and description per config. Enjoy!

Download it!

Some Dutch keywords for search:
parametrische Skiffy afstandsbus busje bus afstandhouder bestand

First I want to document the process for cutting, engraving and a combined “mode” for cutting and engraving. Before I forget it myself.

Be prepared. This will not be at all logical. Or efficient.
As several people have pointed out, the standard software that comes with the machines is a complete pain in the butt. It’s protected by a dongle – though you wouldn’t even want to rip it. It won’t run on a virtual machine. Etc.

Illustrator vector cutting via CorelDRAW and Moshidraw

Let’s start “simple”. Just cutting a vector graphic from a decent graphics suite or CAD-package is reasonably simple:

- In Illustrator, draw your shapes and save the file as an .ai without compression
- Open the .ai in Corel and export it as a .plt (pay attention to the “Curve resolution” parameter in the “Advanced” tab.
- Start Moshidraw and create a new file
- Click “Output (O) > AllPage”. The software seems to crash. Be patient.
- In the top right corner of the new window, click on the checkbox right to the “PLT File” button. This button will now be available (!?!)
- Select the PLT file you just generated
- Adjust parameters and click “Output”

So it’ll take you 3 programs (on 3 different systems, for me) to finally slice some stuff, but at least you’ll be able to design in Illustrator.

Combined vector cutting and vector engraving from Illustrator

Although I won’t be using it much, I wanted to be able to engrave and cut a material at the same time. This – it seems – is impossible. The closest I could get is making two separate files and first engrave, then cut. Align the two files in Moshidraw’s main window, but do the cutting directly in the production window. So here goes:

- Design your piece in Illustrator, following the steps above. Make sure that the stuff you want to engrave has a solid black fill.
- Open the file in Corel and export two different .plt files: one for cutting, one for engraving. You can select the items and use the “Selected only”-checkbox in the export dialog.
- Open Moshidraw, create a new file of at least the size of your workpiece.
- Select the “Image (I) > Image”-menu option. Click anywhere in the workspace. You’ll be prompted for a file. Select the .plt file you created for cutting.
- Align the image neatly in the top left corner. Import the other .plt (for engraving) and align as you designed it. Yes, it might be a bit off, but you won’t notice half a mm shift with engraving.
- Delete the cutting .plt image. We’ll cut it in the “Output window”. We just needed it for alignment. Moshidraw is a b*tch about image order (back, front) so play around with that for a while.
- Select “Output (O) > AllPage”. Adjust parameters as needed. Engrave.
- After the engraving is done, cut the .plt you created for cutting as described earlier (directly in the Output window).

The reason for this weird workflow? Moshidraw rasterizes your .plt when you import it. For engraving, that’s fine. For cutting, the lines will be mangled. So you have to cut directly in the Output window, which preserves the vectors from the .plt. Thanks to this guy for working that out.

Frustrated? Get an Epilog, which are about 15x more expensive, but have a better (but not perfect) workflow. Don’t ask me how I figured this out…

For those few times I’ll need to engrave and cut, I have a workaround.  I hope this will be useful for some lost soul sometimes.

A solution for this is using Adafruit’s updated bootloader. Unfortunately, I don’t have a proper programming device, and I also don’t like to use avrdude to upload sketches (as proposed by ladyada).

So I wanted to use ArduinoISP to flash the bootloader and the Arduino IDE for later programming. Here’s what I did:

- Get Ladyada’s bootloader package for 328′s (most modern Arduino’s have these) and extract it.
- For Mac: Open up your Arduino app package (go to applications, right click on Arduino and select “Show package contents”.
- Copy the file named “ATmegaBOOT_xx8_adaboot328.hex” to “/Contents/Resources/Java/hardware/arduino/bootloaders/atmega” inside the application.
- Adjust the boards.txt file (at “Contents/Resources/Java/hardware/arduino”) to include a reference to the Adaboot-”board”:

##############################################################

atmega328ADA.name=Arduino Duemilanove or Nano w/ ATmega328 ADABOOT

atmega328ADA.upload.protocol=stk500
atmega328ADA.upload.maximum_size=30720
atmega328ADA.upload.speed=19200

atmega328ADA.bootloader.low_fuses=0xFF
atmega328ADA.bootloader.high_fuses=0xDA
atmega328ADA.bootloader.extended_fuses=0×05
atmega328ADA.bootloader.path=atmega
atmega328ADA.bootloader.file=adaboot328.hex
atmega328ADA.bootloader.unlock_bits=0x3F
atmega328ADA.bootloader.lock_bits=0x0F

atmega328ADA.build.mcu=atmega328p
atmega328ADA.build.f_cpu=16000000L
atmega328ADA.build.core=arduino

##############################################################

- Not sure if this was really necessary, but replace the stock avrdude.conf with the one from the package (at “Contents/Resources/Java/hardware/tools/avr/etc”) and delete all lines from 522 – 715 (dealing with parallel programmers, throwing errors on OS X for obvious reasons).

- Restart the Arduino IDE. A new board should now show up under Tools > Board called “Arduino Duemilanove or Nano w/ ATmega328 ADABOOT”

- Get an Arduino with auto-reset disabled, select “Arduino Duemilanove or Nano w/ ATmega328″ (NOT ADABOOT!) and upload the “ArduinoISP” example.
- Wire that up to the second Arduino that you want to upload Adaboot bootloader to.
- Follow the rest of the tutorial

Remember that you’ll have to select “Arduino Duemilanove or Nano w/ ATmega328 ADABOOT” as the board if you want to flash something to that Arduino. I suggest marking the Arduino as such.

Thanks for Dorkbot for much of the details. His tutorial is nice, but a bit outdated…
This post also explained a lot.

A test sketch:

//Watchdogtest.pde
//requires adaboot!

#include <avr/io.h>
#include <avr/wdt.h>

int ledPin = 13;

void setup()
{
wdt_reset();
wdt_enable(WDTO_8S);
pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);
Serial.begin(9600);
Serial.println(“RESET”);
}

void loop()
{

for(int i = 0; i < 3; i++){

digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);   // sets the LED on
delay(1000);                  // waits for a 10 seconds
digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);    // sets the LED off
delay(250);                  // waits
wdt_reset();
Serial.println(“wdtr”);

}

digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);   // sets the LED on
delay(10000);                  // waits for a 10 seconds
digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);    // sets the LED off

}

I will update my thermostat tonight and post the results.

So I had to build one myself. Below is the first alpha-stage prototype, running a test. It’s based on the great Arduino platform, incarnated as a nanode. On top is a Grove-shield from Seeed studio for easy prototyping, with a relay that controls heating. (During the test, the relay is the heating element itself.) Wired into a breadboard is a DS18B20 OneWire digital temperature sensor.

And a sample from my Pachube feed:

Notice the temperature bouncing around, but being relatively stable around 22 degrees Celcius. I’m curious to see if this will also be the case when I hook it up to my central heating. There’s still a lot to be done before I can actually call this an “Open Source Nest”, but for me the basic functions are here.

I can now adjust the temperature of my home about half an hour before I get home! I will post my findings after actually using it for a while.

Here is some basic info about the sketch:

Nanode + Pachube + DS18B20 temperature sensor + relay = internet controlled thermostat

Code relies heavily on the following arduino sketches:
EtherShield ENC ReadPachube example
PacubeV3_WithoutNode by WickedDevice
The Dallas Temperature library and its examples

Features:
DHCP
DNS
Onewire temp sensing

Todo:
PID control
Local Override
Failsafe (no connection, weird data, …)
Neater temperature getting from pachube (“Z,”)
Pachube normal temperatures (no *100; floats instead)
Timing (programming) (better yet: self programming)

Scheme:
Nanode or Arduino with ENC ethernet shield
Relay on pin 5
OneWire temp sensor (DS18B20) on pin 4

Download the sketch

People would bring me broken gadgets all the time; I’d try to fix them if the problem was simple. If it wasn’t, I’d take the product apart and document what I’d see. I even lectured on this topic a few times.

These are not the well-documented “repair manuals” you’ll find at the great repository of iFixit. Instead, these photos are mostly an overview of the assembly, and detailed macro shots of things that I found interesting: some weird way of bolting something down, or injection molding marks, for instance.

You are free to use these photos for any non-commercial goal. Education would be my preference.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Netherlands License.

I will be posting new photos on a regular basis. Let me know if you’re searching for something specific. Please also get in touch when you use these photos for something!

Just built an ATtiny Arduino programmer from these instructions. Nice to shrink simple projects!