This is more of a discussion topic so I put it in meta. The videos under discussion have been pulled, but here are the...

I'm looking for the specific manufacturers and associated part numbers for the various connectors used by iphones. The...

Hey everybody! Has anyone found the Pentalobe screw patent? I spent some time digging and I found something incredibly...

Hi Ifixit folks. I wanted to provide some feedback to the documentation interface used on ifixit.com. So far it's been...

Mods, change this user's profile photo or mark as spam and remove his post. https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/4885... If...

Thanks for the ifixit community shout out :D. There are a bunch of great people here answering questions and it's a...

I was wondering if iFixit offered a Pro Tech Screwdriver set in JIS. I am debating just getting the 5 piece standard...

Hey Everybody! I've been working on a top-down camera setup for documenting projects and teardowns. I'm looking for some...

Quick one. I tried patrolling some posts and it seems that I cannot edit, accept or deny any posts. I looked for posts...

Hey guys! I'm looking for a category for my new teardown. I think "computer hardware" would be suitable, as the Microsoft...

Two come to mind: The KiCAD project https://www.kicad.org/donate/ What they do: Provide free schematic entry and PCBA software. The kicad devs have created software that rivals eagle and orcad, but there is no cost of use. This has single-handedly eliminated the barrier of entry into making professional PCBs. No longer do you need to be a mega-corp to use push-and-shove for moving traces, circuit simulation and create matched trace lengths for differential pair traces. Why this is important: If you want to make a flex pcb for your 1990s gameboy, you need software to make that happen. Circuit design software used to be expensive pay-per-month software. Kicad is free. You can make a pcb for your switch or add a flex pcb with headphone jack to an iphone like strangeparts did. More about them: https://www.kicad.org/about/kicad/ Open Source Hardware Association https://www.oshwa.org/membership/ What they do: Promote open source hardware and enable engineers and creators to build off each other's designs within...

Hi Mike, Greetings from NY. It sounds like you have a tremendous amount on your plate. In regards to PPE, try to find Scuba masks. Reach out to Formlabs and MasksOn about their scuba-helmet-to-filter adapter. Engineers from Formlabs, Onshape, iRobot and many others are teaming up to mass produce adapters to re-purpose scuba masks for hospital use. https://formlabs.com/covid-19-response/ https://maskson.org/ Scuba masks have the benefit of a full face seal that could be tested with a fit-test machine. Formlabs is working with Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), Massachusetts General Hospital and several others to get them onto the front line. They should also offer a higher level of protection than a normal N95 disposable mask could offer. If you are able to get a supply of scuba masks, this is a very promising solution. This is not a rushed thrown together solution, it looks like the best alternative to a full face mask. I can imagine the protection factor of a scuba mask if significantly better than a...

Hey! love to give a hand. Anyway I can help as an EE/ME? Does anyone have any sale statistics for ventilators? Is there a dominant brand or series so we can focus our repair efforts to have the most impact? Thanks :D

After reading up on this issue, it definitely seems like an underhanded move by apple to encourage apple-only batteries as replacement batteries. Of course, there are potential solutions to this battery recognition problem, but none of them are quick or pretty. We are truly at a point in time where so many tools and software packages are available (even free ones) that anything is possible. The solution to this problem is quite laborious. A brief overview of the procedure would look something like this: 1. Take the apple specific chip and attempt to read it with TI-specific utilities 2. Attempt to dump the contents of the microcontoller's rom 3. If reading and dumping contents unsuccessful, decap chip and look for similarities in gate structure 4. analyze an apple-ti chip and normal TI chip by running the equivalent of a software diff. Find the specific oddball code, repackage the ROM and use it to re-flash off the shelf TI chips. Of course, redistributing this code used on the apple-ti chip is greatly...

Curious, would a program like Clonezilla work for mac? It is a self-bootable linux environment and does a bit level clone through command line. If you use a usb boot device boot to usb and run clonezilla off usb, wouldn’t it be able to clone mac os completely? I don’t spend a lot of time on macos so I could be wrong, but ive used clonezilla on windows and linux no prob bob. Thanks.

@oldturkey03 Thank you for your input. It is fantastic. I just looked through the related patents and I did not see a mention of the patent for the screw. It is possible that it may be a japanese patent and unfortunately that it not my main language :/. To explain why I am investigating pentalobe screws: ifixit first found the pentalobe screw used by apple in 2009. At the time, it was extremely unpopular as a screw. It was used in practically nothing else besides the 2009 15-inch MacBook Pro and caused quite a stir, which may have lead people to believe it was an apple proprietary screw. In a recent twitter post by Emma Laurijssens, she mentions her ipod hdd features such pentalobe screws and it was manufactured in 2007. This piqued my interest as I have never seen a hdd with screws other than torx or phillips. It seemed fitting that apple would consider implementing an oddball screw in the ipod hdd as it was the one component that they had exclusive rights to (18mo exclusivity rights with toshiba) during...

Hey everybody! I thought I'd give a little update and show you how the footage looks from a top down view. I have some shots from the camera arm in my Lambda power supply teardown & analysis video. The lighting is still a bit of a challenge, but I think the shots look pretty square and parallel to the table. I did not perform any lens correction or perspective correction in video editing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly1QGHXD... I still have another camera on a tripod, which I bump into a lot, but the top down shots definitely help with circuit analysis.

There are tags? I never even noticed, lol. I would use them if it makes searching for solutions easier!

Here's some more detailed shots of the camera arm. @oldturkey03 My camera arm measures 19.5in in length, and is cut from the leg portion of one side of the walker. Each walker leg is about 30in long from bottom to top of the handle. I wanted to get as much use out of the walker as possible, so I decided to use whatever scrap pieces for a camera gimbal stand, which uses a similar diameter tubing. I measured 19.5in from the top handle toward the bottom of the walker and made a cut with a standard circular pipe cutter. This left me with a 10.5in segment for one of the legs on my 3 axis gimbal stand. I determined the desired camera arm length after some mockups with wooden dowels. I found that between 18in and 19.5in is the sweet spot for fitting the entire width of my ESD mat within the field of view of my camera. The field of view on my Panasonic GH3 is slightly different from my GH4 and slightly different from my LX100. That 1.5in of wiggle space allows me to compensate for the difference in video framing...

Looks good! The cheating section looks like a nice addition, and good call on clarifying the California business hours thing. I *always* forget the 3 hour difference. Also, love the last line :D