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We're Not Innovating, We’re Just Forgetting Slower
(www.elektormagazine.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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I do think people in general could benefit from maybe $100 in tools and a healthy dose of Youtube when it comes to this point. My PC of 10 years wouldn't boot one morning because my SSD died. There wasn't anything too important on it that I hadn't backed up, but it was still a bummer. I took it apart, and started poking around. Found a short across a capacitor, so I started cycling capacitors. Sure enough, one was bad. Replaced it. Boots just fine. (Moved everything to a new SSD just in case).
All I needed for this job was a multimeter and a soldering iron (though hot air gun made it slightly easier).
I think the "black box" nature of electronics is mostly illusory due to how we treat our devices. A friend bought a walking treadmill that wouldn't turn on out of the box. She contacted the company, they told her to trash it and just shipped her a new one.
She gave it to me, I took it apart. One of the headers that connects the power switch to the mainboard was just unplugged. It took literally 10 minutes to "fix" including disassembly and assembly, and all I needed was a screwdriver.
Yet there's zero expectation of user maintenance. If it doesn't work, trash it.
This guy might be looking in the wrong places.
My buddy has a $6000 projector. He found it in the trash. The only thing wrong with it was a cracked solder on the power supply.
Similarly, I have a $5000 audio console that I got for ~$100 in parts; it had a bad power supply. Honestly, probably just a bad capacitor on the power supply, but I didn’t feel like desoldering every capacitor to check their capacitance. Diagnosing the power supply took about 5 minutes, and most of that was just finding all of the screws that were holding the case together. A quick read with a multimeter told me everything I needed to know. Swapped out the supply, and it has been working fine ever since.
I can top that. I got a broken $100 BlueYeti microphone for $10 on eBay. The USB cable they shipped it with was bad.