Belkin charger standby power. (Credit: Denki Otaku, YouTube) A well-known property of wall warts like power bricks and USB chargers is that they always consume some amount of power even when there’s no connected device drawing power from them. This feels rather wasteful when you have a gaggle of USB chargers constantly plugged in, especially […]
The test setup for the Battle Born LFP cycling. (Credit: Will Prowse, YouTube) There has been quite a bit of news recently about the Battle Born LiFePO4 (LFP) batteries and how they are dying in droves if not outright melting their plastic enclosures. Although the subsequent autopsies show molten plastic spacers on the bus bars […]
LEGO SMART brick from its side. (Credit: EvilmonkeyzDesignz, YouTube) At the beginning of March this year LEGO released their new SMART brick, which looks like a 2×4 stud brick and is filled to the brim with sensors, LEDs, NFC and Bluetooth functionality, as well as a purported custom ASIC. The central idea behind it appears […]
Before it became viable to distribute and play music tracks on home computers, the use of FM and Wavetable synthesis was very common, with MIDI Wavetable-based devices like the Roland MT-32 and SC-55 still highly sought after today. The Creative Midi Blaster MB-10 that [Yeo Kheng Meng] reviewed and tore down for an analysis isn’t […]
Everyone loves Wago connectors for how versatile and effective they are for quickly and securely connecting conductors, but it can be tempting to buy a bag of the significantly cheaper knock-offs. The reason why this can be a terrible idea is explained by [Big Clive] who tore down a few bags of them to ogle […]
The timer mechanism of the Vend-o-Vision. (Credit: SpaceTime Junction, YouTube) There was a time before portable TVs and personal media players when the idea of putting coin-operated TVs everywhere, from restaurants to airports and laundromats, would have seemed like a solid business model. Thus was born the Vend-o-Vision by Mini-TV USA, which presented itself as […]
Recently [ElecrArc240] got his paws on an Intel-branded 3 kW power supply that apparently had been designed as a reference PSU for servers. At 3 kW in such a compact package air cooling would be rather challenging, so it has a big water block sandwiched between the two beefy PCBs. In the full teardown and […]
The RF section of the ESP32-C6 die. (Credit: electronupdate, YouTube) With the ESP32-P4 not having any wireless functionality and instead focusing on being a small SoC, it makes sense to combine it with a second chip that handles features like WiFi and Bluetooth. This makes the Guition ESP32-P4-M3 module both a pretty good example of […]
Apple AirTags have speakers in them, and the speaker is not entirely under the owner’s control. [Shahram] shows how the speaker of an AirTag can be disabled while keeping the device watertight. Because AirTags are not intended to be opened or tampered with, doing so boils down to making a hole in just the right […]
More molten plastic spacers between the bus bar and terminal. (Credit: Will Prowse) Because size matters when it comes to statistics, [Will Prowse] decided to not just bank on his handful of failed Battle Born LFP batteries when it came to documenting their failure modes. Instead he got a whole gaggle of them from a […]