Ever wonder what marvelous things were inside a Mechanical Light Switch Timer? Me neither, but I had one go bad on me and I was curious what caused the failure. Turned out a tiny piece of plastic cause the failure. This could have been built just the tiniest bit beefier and it would still be working. To see the below pictures in hi-res click here.
After about 3 or so years my 3 20 inch LG Flatron W2052TQ monitors started failing. They were continuously powered on for their entire life and would simply go into sleep mode when the computers weren’t in use. You can see the repair video below that shows the 2 1000uF caps that were the culprit. At this time I have still to crack open the other 2 monitors but
 You probably have a few of these AirWick Freshmatic room fragrance sprayers in your house. One thing I noticed on the packaging was it could only be used with AirWick refills. I was curious how they could tell the difference between Airwick and generic refill canisters. Turns out there is a Vishay TCNT2000 Reflective Optical Sensor that is at the heart of their protection scheme. It simply looks
 This time we will be taking a look at a Black and Decker model T2707SKT Toaster. Not that I was looking for a toaster to teardown but I just happened to stumble across it at my local XS Cargo store. It was a factory reconditioned unit that was then returned. The issue listed on the ticket was that one side didn’t heat properly. The regular price was around
 This video was going to be a repair of this Portable USB Charger but as it turns out there wasn’t anything electrically wrong with it. It didn’t work out of the box but I think that must have been caused by some oxidation on the USB contacts. It seems to work like a champ now. The control chip for the DC/DC converter looks to be this DHMF chip.
If you are doing any electrical work, one of these Non Contact Voltage Test Pens can be quite handy. Just touch the wire that you want to make sure isn’t live and check that the tester doesn’t beep and start flashing. This test pen is on all the time monitoring for AC between 90V and 1000 V. I would have preferred the device to have an on/off switch which
Thanks to Black and Decker for sending in this Gyro Screwdriver for review, you can see the review here. In this article we are going to tear into it and see what we have on the inside. Opening the unit was very simple since there are just 5 phillips screws holding the unit together, unfortunately the screws come in 2 different sizes (these go into the handle of the
