Electronic devices

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Sclass
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Re: Electronic devices

Post by Sclass »

SalutNounou wrote:Another domain where you could make money repairing electronic devices would be in Vintage Hifi. ...Usually the repair work is just to change the old chemical capacitors, so it is not very difficult to do.
You are so right. Dried out electrolytic caps are also common in old guitar amps. I have an old buddy who likes to restore old guitar amps and does well trading vintage tubes. Apparently they aren't created equal. He will buy an unknown amp cheap And replace the coveted tubes with cheap ones and resell the tubes and "restored" amp for more than he paid.

DIY audio is fun. I had the opposite experience in grad school. I wanted to build but I found it was cheaper to buy used stuff rich guys got tired of. Pre craigslist...rec.audio I think. I missed out on learning tubes.

I just thought of another one. 1980s motorcycle ignition systems. Some of the Japanese makes like Suzuki are no longer providing cdi units for their old bikes. It's a show stopper if you have a cherry bike with a burned cdi. A cottage industry exists where they obtain a good unit, read out the output under simulated input and then replicate the old analog circuit with microcode and a chip. Somebody I know did this for Mercedes tachometer amplifiers because the real ones are grossly overpriced.

CactusSurfer
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Re: Electronic devices

Post by CactusSurfer »

@SClass
Thanks for the advice.
@SalutNounou
Capacitors failing is one of the big issues for any older electronics from what I understand. For what it's worth, one of my former coworkers collected high end tape recorders from the 1980s and 1990; he mentioned that they were a bit pricey. Apparently there is still a market for older higher-end audio equipment.

IlliniDave
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Re: Electronic devices

Post by IlliniDave »

BRUTE wrote:at this point, not even an EE major could repair modern phones/laptops. too embedded.
Not true! I'm still on my first cell phone (non-smart, flips like a Star Trek Communicator). It was replaced once under warranty 7 years ago. It developed a problem several months back where it would randomly power off while typing a text message. The problem was arguably mechanical in nature, but after two months of trying to figure out what was up, I managed to fix it.

Besides that, I have one laptop computer. It's my fourth computer overall. My first one still works, but it was a Pentium II and just became obsolete after about 3 years, could barely handle Win98 OS. Since then I've had two others that failed irreparably (or at least it was more cost effective just to junk them and get a new one). I also have a Sony knockoff of an ipod, and a few pieces of guitar signal processing gear, most of which is > 10 years old. I did get a new preamp 3-4 years ago with money I got selling off one of my guitars and a few other odds/ends.

Dragline
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Re: Electronic devices

Post by Dragline »

SalutNounou wrote:Another domain where you could make money repairing electronic devices would be in Vintage Hifi. It is clearly a niche market but I know for a fact that a lot of people are looking for old tube amplifiers or solid state devices from the seventies (think old Marantz or Sansui amps like this one : http://www.hifi-studio.de/hifi-klassike ... U-555A.htm).

These devices have an argus price that tends to go up significantly lately because of the audiophile community. Usually the repair work is just to change the old chemical capacitors, so it is not very difficult to do.
My father has a Marantz 2270 that I believe still works just fine after 35 years.

SalutNounou
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Re: Electronic devices

Post by SalutNounou »

Yes, they are usually good stuffs. Amps from this period were very musical *. Hifi producers used to think that the less component on the signal way, the better the final sound, and that less distortion is not always synonymous with better sound. it was before these integrated circuits, those who tend to have giant feedback loops which will reduce the distortion to a minimum amount, but kill the musicality of the amp.

When they are still in good condition, these amps are worth more than $500. At least, it was the case last year when I came by this store in Paris :
https://www.facebook.com/Mood.vinyles.h ... 5038856898

What is cool with Vintage Hifi is that usually the price of good elements does not amortize. For instance I bought several years ago a pair of kef Ls3/5 a loudspeakers, for around 1000USD.
I had the good surprise today to see that their worth on the market has almost doubled :mrgreen: :mrgreen:
http://www.canuckaudiomart.com/details/ ... d-edition/

So I really think that someone who is good at finding old broken amps and repairing them would be able to generate some serious income.

*Woops, typical survivor bias here. I guess not all amps were good, but an interesting quantity of models were good enough for us to still talk about and like them today.

bryan
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Re: Electronic devices

Post by bryan »

BRUTE wrote: brute actually seems to get allergic reactions when watching any Apple presentations lately.
BRUTE watches Apple presentations? wth?
IlliniDave wrote:
BRUTE wrote:at this point, not even an EE major could repair modern phones/laptops. too embedded.
Not true!
I mostly side with BRUTE. The category of repairs you can make on a phone/laptop is more limited than that of a PC. Smartphones are not like PCs, where you can really have a go at making mods and soldering things or trying new softwares, due to 1) so much of the HW being integrated into the SoC and 2) many unique hardware/firmwares/software combinations for a single device that do not translate easily to another device. For instance, savvy users may be able to do some kludging to repair a smartphone or to get it running newer system software, but it will usually be at the expense of something else breaking (performance tunings, power management, sw security like authenticated modules, or DRM related things like video playback come to mind immediately). Note, even makers of smartphones with many EEs on staff can't get it right (power management of a device is complex and not many devices are close to optimal, especially after system software updates).

IlliniDave
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Re: Electronic devices

Post by IlliniDave »

bryan wrote:
IlliniDave wrote:
BRUTE wrote:at this point, not even an EE major could repair modern phones/laptops. too embedded.
Not true!
I mostly side with BRUTE. The category of repairs you can make on a phone/laptop is more limited than that of a PC. Smartphones are not like PCs, where you can really have a go at making mods and soldering things or trying new softwares, due to 1) so much of the HW being integrated into the SoC and 2) many unique hardware/firmwares/software combinations for a single device that do not translate easily to another device. For instance, savvy users may be able to do some kludging to repair a smartphone or to get it running newer system software, but it will usually be at the expense of something else breaking (performance tunings, power management, sw security like authenticated modules, or DRM related things like video playback come to mind immediately). Note, even makers of smartphones with many EEs on staff can't get it right (power management of a device is complex and not many devices are close to optimal, especially after system software updates).
Well, I'm one EE and I fixed my phone, restored it to perfect working condition. :) BRUTE did not specify all the qualifications or specific actions you did. Many times (not always) repairs are actually quite simple if they can be properly diagnosed. I cut my teeth in the business doing exactly that. Cell phones are a different beast (PCs less so) compared to what I worked on, but the principles are not so different.

daylen
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Re: Electronic devices

Post by daylen »

BRUTE wrote:brute really, really wants to not go back to Linux, but Apple is making it harder and harder..
Why do you not want to go back to linux?

BRUTE
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Re: Electronic devices

Post by BRUTE »

daylen wrote:
BRUTE wrote:brute really, really wants to not go back to Linux, but Apple is making it harder and harder..
Why do you not want to go back to linux?
Linux feels like computing in the stone age. but Apple is working hard every day to make Mac OS into a concentration camp, and at one point, the stone age just doesn't seem that bad any longer.

for reference, brute had a Linux laptop as his last machine, now on a MBP. there is simply no laptop out there that even comes close in terms of hardware quality and being balanced, and Mac OS X is the better UNIX. but they keep adding all this shit and making actual stuff harder. there hasn't been a feature added to MacOS X that was useful to brute since.. maybe Snow Leopard? some of the bugs/bullshit from 10.0 is still present today. and Apple not only doesn't show any interest in appealing to the crowd of individuals who actually use their computer for typing and stuff like that, they insult them by removing useful features and adding fucking balloons and fireworks and siri and locking everything in the app store, so now everybody can have a shitty ecosystem full of crap, not just iOS users.

daylen
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Re: Electronic devices

Post by daylen »

BRUTE wrote:Linux feels like computing in the stone age.
I don't know about that. Both gnome 3 and kde plasma feel just as modern as anything windows or mac has created.

Maybe I am biased, but anything other than arch linux or debian annoys me.

BRUTE
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Re: Electronic devices

Post by BRUTE »

brute really wants to like Linux/OSS, but on the consumer level, they're just terrible. brute never liked any KDE (admittedly didn't even try the newest one) and gnome was more like.. well, it's not KDE. Ubuntu's new window manager (Unity?) was terrible and crashy, maybe it's better now. brute had arch + awesomeWM for a while, but it does get tiresome to have to spend so much time just to do regular stuff.. make the font not look terrible, make the battery last even 1/2 as long as on a Mac, make the text readable at high resolution, map ctrl to caps lock (the first 17 tutorials didn't work), watch that one flash video a friend sends brute, wonder if the computer will boot after dist upgrade, find intel wifi driver that works well, mail client that's still under development (Thunderbird isn't), browser that's not a memory hog(both FF and Chrome/Chromium are terrible in that regard), copy and paste between terminal and window manager apps, getting screen brightness to 100% (apparently not trivial), gvim is way worse than mvim, apt is worse than brew, making the sound card work, making the HDMI output work, making the sound in the HDMI output work (not trivial), finding a working video editor for that 1 video per year...

add to that, Macs are actually not much/any more expensive for similar quality hardware. brute had to spend $1,500 for a laptop that he would consider "mostly same quality", and even then it had a terrible track pad and keyboard, basically disqualifiers. it's possible do spend much less than on a Mac, but then it's going to be a terrible laptop. the $400 Dell laptop is unusable comparing by build quality, battery life, quality keyboard and trackpad and screen with almost every Mac laptop (Air is excluded for shitty screen resolution).

daylen
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Re: Electronic devices

Post by daylen »

I don't like kde either.

I tried to build from the ground up using arch + i3 for a year or so (manually configuring booting, fonts, battery power, wifi, blah, blah) and eventually settled with arch + gnome de package which basically takes care of all this for you. Gnome is simple and is very reliable. I don't mind how FF hogs memory since I rarely max out 4gb ram. Wifi drivers can be a pain sometimes though. Pacman is the reason I stay with arch, it is the best package manager I have used by far (for my purposes).

I bought my labtop refurbished for just under $300 and built my desktop from parts for about $600 (both of which I am happy with), so I don't really need the quality or computational power that apple computer's provide.

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Sclass
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Re: Electronic devices

Post by Sclass »

bryan wrote: . Smartphones are not like PCs, where you can really have a go at making mods and soldering things or trying new softwares, due to 1) so much of the HW being integrated into the SoC and 2) many unique hardware/firmwares/software combinations for a single device that do not translate easily to another device. For instance, savvy users may be able to do some kludging to repair a smartphone or to get it running newer system software, but it will usually be at the expense of something else breaking (performance tunings, power management, sw security like authenticated modules, or DRM related things like video playback come to mind immediately). Note, even makers of smartphones with many EEs on staff can't get it right (power management of a device is complex and not many devices are close to optimal, especially after system software updates).
I still manage to fix a lot of stuff. I find weak solder and connectors come up more often than people think. It is an area that is hard for a designer to control that gets challenged every time you drop your phone. Granted I like to restrict my work to items that worked very well prior to me getting them. That helps get rid of some of the impossible scenarios you listed.

Edit - something I forgot to mention is if I get one fixed and learn its problem I go out and get more. There is nothing like probing a known good model side by side with a dead one. You can get to the root of the failure faster by comparing the two.

Forskaren
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Re: Electronic devices

Post by Forskaren »

I have been thinking about the advantages of focusing in one ecosystem compared to using stuff from different suppliers or ecosystems. There is a lot of options both for hardware and services today. For example if you focus on Apple, you pay a premium but expect to get reasonable good stuff every time. Buying a windows PC or android phone can be better value than what Apple offer, but if you don't do your research you can be very displeased.

What do you think generally about the advantages and disadvantages to stay in one ecosystem as much as possibly?

Apple:
-Mac
-iOS
-Apple watch
-Apple tv
-iTunes, Apple music, iBooks
-iCloud

Google:
-Chrome os or chrome web browser
-Android or Google apps on iOS
-Google play (apps, music, books)
-Chrome-cast
-Google drive


Microsoft:
-Windows
-Windows phone (almost dead), or Microsoft apps for iOS or Android
-Xbox
-Microsoft office
-Microsofts' offerings for music and movies
-OneDrive

Independent
-Spotify
-Amazon
-Yahoo
-Linux
-Facebook
-Sony/playstation

ducknalddon
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Re: Electronic devices

Post by ducknalddon »

The trouble with a lot of the technology in your list is it exists just for the purpose of selling you something else, be it movies, music, services, more hardware, etc.

Forskaren
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Re: Electronic devices

Post by Forskaren »

@ducknalddon
Yes and that is true about almost everything else as well. Depending on your priorities, buying is not always bad.

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Sclass
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Re: Electronic devices

Post by Sclass »

I like the iPhones because they usually worked when shipped.

I remember working on an MP3 player by creative years ago. It was an HDD unit. It was buggy from the factory and no amount of tinkering could get it to work because it never worked reliably.

Somebody passed me an iPad 1 and an iPhone 4 recently. They worked but the OS was so old and not upgrade able that they are just paper weights. I guess I can use them as iPods.

I did a bunch of digital cameras a few years ago. Sony and Nikon. I'd just buy dead ones cheap on eBay and cobble cameras together with what parts were still good. I standardized on two specific cameras. Broken LCDs, broken power buttons, shorted backup power capacitors. Bad ribbon connectors. Bad solder. Now I have a pile of those.

Fun stuff. Kind of my fixit rush heroin.

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