Today’s quick teardown target is a 1985 vintage electronic load made by Kikusui of Japan. It came from eBay with a noisy fan, but was otherwise fairly functional despite the considerable age.
Only 2 inches wide
In the usual Kuzyatech fashion, when something breaks, we must take it apart. Today, one of the “early adopter” GU10 style LED lamps decided to fail mechanically:
We have a problem
In continuation of Carbon Monoxide teardowns, we now have a Kidde KN-COEG-3 detector designed to handle both carbon monoxide and natural gas in residential use. Unlike the previous target (First Alert FCD2BT), this one never worked that well, causing frequent “GAS” false panics and piercing alarms, so a teardown is a natural progression for this model! Continue reading
It appears there is no end to things breaking and ending up in Kuzyatech lab. Today’s patient is a Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ media streaming box that decided to stop noticing USB drives. The box is a nice little device that can play audio and video content from the network or from one of the three local USB ports: front, rear or a dock-like middle one that’s used to connect Seagate’s own portable hard drive. Both front and back ports were dead. Well, time to take it apart! Continue reading
Today’s teardown target is a DLO Power Bug model MH-01DU. This was a relatively expensive portable charger, that lasted a few years before getting into Kuzyatech lab. The complaint was that it made arching sounds, smelled hot and was not charging. Continue reading
Today we have a teardown of a Soviet calculator Elektronika MK 51( Электроника МК 51) for those familiar with the language. It was bought new in 1993, worked (sorta) for a few years and just drove me absolutely nuts with its lack of any reliability. The design is supposedly a clone of Casio FX-2500
Front view
It’s time to see what the flea market special $5 Fluke 8000A looks like up close
Missing an overlay
Here is the BMS that came with my Headway LiFePO4 cells. After a few pictures it’ll be very clear why I felt really leery about entrusting my cells to its care.
Looks like this was a 13 channel design, with only 8 populated
Samsung streak continues. This time I am a proud new owner of a dead 23″ Samsung 2333SW LCD monitor from September of 2009. Dead is a bit of an overstatement, but that’s what the previous owner told me. Since the alternative was for it to go into a dumpster, I figured worst case I get a 23″ LVDS panel to play with. On to the symptoms: backlight seems to operate and the “connect you video source” banner is bouncing around the screen. When I do connect it, I see a brief attempt to display an image and then it’s back to gray. Time to take it apart. Continue reading
You’d think after almost a decade of blown caps on motherboards, that the OEMs would finally take care of that? Yeah, sure. I got my hands on a Samsung LN32A330 TV, made in June 2008. Pretty much a brand new thing as far as TVs go. Main complaint- it stopped turning on. So I plug it into my trusty Kill-A-Watt meter and try to power up. I see that it’s trying to draw some current, but then shuts down. Continue reading