• Saigonauticon@voltage.vn
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    8 months ago

    Electronics repair and manufacture. I do this sometimes professionally – however my special talent is doing it with none of the right tools or parts. It’s mostly hilarious and not useful at work, where I need to use the right parts so you can scale to manufacture.

    I once fixed a DVD drive using a gas stove. A graphics card with a tube of toothpaste and some rubber bands. A Macbook with half a cardboard box. Today I built a microphone amplifier from a broken Android development board, a IC from a particle detector, and surface-mount resistors and capacitors from a dozen different things. I could probably work as an engineer in Kerbal Space Program :D

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        7 months ago

        Sadly, my irritation with YouTube is fathomless and eternal :P

        I can clue you in the the first case though – A faulty motor was unable to eject the drive, and a magnet held it in place. So I used the Curie effect to weaken the magnet by roasting it for a short time and putting it back in. I was very poor in those days so knowing these things was pretty useful.

      • Saigonauticon@voltage.vn
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        7 months ago

        I did this thing, stretching decades back, where I would publish every project under a different name, then throw away the password.

        Even I don’t know everything I’ve done, or all the names I’ve gone by.