Fixing 1986 Sinclair Spectrum+2 With A High-Score Of Issues

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum+2 was the first home computer released by Amstrad after buying up Sinclair. It’s basically a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128, but with a proper keyboard and a built-in tape …

Emulating The Battery Controller In An Ancient Acer PDA

[Mark B] had a problem. He’d come into possession of an Acer N30 PDA, sans batteries. He couldn’t just throw any old cells in, since the unit expected to communicate with an onboard con…

Apple Newton Gets Rebuilt Battery Pack

We all carry touch screen computers around in our pockets these days, but before the smartphone revolution, there was the personal digital assistant (PDA). While it wasn’t a commercial succes…

Saving An Electron Microscope From The Trash

Who wouldn’t want to have a scanning electron microscope (SEM)? If you’re the person behind the ProjectsInFlight channel on YouTube, you certainly do. In a recent video it’s expla…

The £25,000 Tom Evans Pre-Amp Repair And A Copyright Strike

We were recently notified by a reader that [Tom Evans] had filed a copyright claim against [Mark]’s repair video on his Mend it Mark YouTube channel, taking down said repair video as well as …

How Corroded Can A Motherboard Be?

We will admit it. If we found a 386 motherboard as badly corroded as the one [Bits und Bolts] did, we would trash it—not him, though. In fact, we were surprised when he showed it and said he had al…

Fluke Meter Fails With A Simple Problem

[TheHWcave] found a Fluke 27 multimeter that looked like it had had quite a rough life. At first, the display flashed an overload indicator until he gave it a good smack—or, as he likes to call it,…

Saving A Samsung TV From The Dreaded Boot Loop

[eigma] had a difficult problem. After pulling a TV out of the trash and bringing it home, it turned out it was suffering from a troubling boot loop issue that basically made it useless. As so many…

Close Shave For An Old Oscilloscope Saved With A Sticky Note

When you tear into an old piece of test equipment, you’re probably going to come up against some surprises. That’s especially true of high-precision gear like oscilloscopes from the tim…

Quick And Very Dirty Repair Gets Smoked PLC Back In The Game

When electronics release the Magic Smoke, more often than not it’s a fairly sedate event. Something overheats, the packaging gets hot enough to emit that characteristic and unmistakable odor,…

Ruined 1993 ThinkPad Tablet Brought Back From The Brink

Collecting retrocomputers is fun, especially when you find fully-functional examples that you can plug in, switch on, and start playing with. Meanwhile, others prefer to find the damaged examples a…

Repairing The Questionable £25,000 Tom Evans Audiophile Pre-Amp

It’s not much of a secret that in the world of ‘audiophile gear’ there is a lot of snake oil and deception, including many products that are at best of questionable value. The Tom…

Reviewing The World’s 2nd Smallest Thermal Camera

A thermal camera is a very handy tool to have, and [Learn Electronics Repair] wanted to try out the Thermal Master P2 for electronic repair, especially since it claims to have a 15 X digital zoom a…

Fix That Old Remote With Graphite

A button that stopped working has probably led to more than a few smashed remotes over the years. Fortunately [pescado99] has shared a beautifully simple cure for dead or dying remote buttons: grap…

The Nixie Tube Multimeter That Almost Made A Comeback

In a world of digital monotony, the Avo DA14 digital multimeter, with its vintage J Nixie tube charm, is a refreshing gem. Recently refurbished by [Thomas Scherrer], this multimeter video review is…

Lies, Big Lies And LED Lightbulb Lifespan Promises

We have probably all seen the marketing blurbs on packaging and elsewhere promoting the amazing lifespan of LED lighting solutions. Theoretically you should be able to install a LED bulb in a fixtu…

BNCs For An Old Instrument

Back in the summer our eye was caught by [Jazzy Jane]’s new signal generator, or perhaps we should say her new-to-her signal generator. It’s an Advance E1 from around 1950, and it was p…

Apple IOS 18’s New Repair Assistant: Easier Parts Pairing Yet With Many Limitations

Over the years, Apple has gone all-in on parts pairing. Virtually every component in an iPhone and iPad has a unique ID that’s kept in a big database over at Apple, which limits replacement p…

McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Gain A DMCA Exemption

An unlikely theatre for an act in the right-to-repair saga came last year in the form of McDonalds restaurants, whose McFlurry ice cream machines are prone to breakdown. The manufacturer had locked…

Simple PCB Repairs Keep Old Vehicle Out Of The Crusher

For those of us devoted to keeping an older vehicle on the road, the struggle is real. We know that at some point, a part will go bad and we’ll learn that it’s no longer available from …