what's the most memorable way you've destroyed a piece of hardware?

I left my laptop on top of a heating unit today and then proceeded to crank it up to like 80°C. I'll try turning it on when it cools down, the plastic hasn't melted so I'm optimistic, but I'm pretty sure the battery's a pillow.

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I remember killing an mp3 player by inputting 12 volts through the headphones jack. It still worked after that but the sound quality was total distortion.

@cafecortado yeah, I think I have fried audio inputs before. Forgot to use a capacitor and it got the dc bias.

I only repair things, but I'm an expert at breaking stuff too.

@Demolishun You're talking to the best roadie in the world. You need three phase equipment? No problem! Let's fill that sound hole for you.

@bazmd are you a line man? I am convinced people who work on electrical lines should be called Power Rangers.

@Demolishun I have a background in electrical engineering, my last position for 6 years was as an electronics engineer in the field of security. Do you really want to fuck with me? Ha...

@bazmd I used to be a sparky. Now I write software all day. Used to do control engineering. Still do, but mainly writing C++.

dropped the first smartphone I ever got into the toilet in less than a week of getting it

I RMA'ed it and said it just didn't turn on when I got it. did open it up and put white-out on all the little red water sensors first. googled to figure that out

I had never had a job, my mom sat on welfare for a decade by that point, and I was eating food via a student loan at the time, so

they shipped me a new one. awyeee

and then unfortunately I lost that phone to someone being a cunt... I'm actually unreasonably pissed about it because to me it was literally a heirloom. it never broke. the tech was a marvel. and this fucker "borrowed" a spare phone from me and never brought it back. that model sold on the secondary market for more than it was originally sold by the vendor at, both at time of launch and for years after, probably still to this day. fucking hell am I livid pissed

@jestdotty ngl, whiteout on the sensors is pretty sly.

The battery shrank back to its normal size as it cooled down so I turned on the thing today, and it works perfectly. The battery life is even somewhat better than it was for some reason (30min instead of 15min). I guess that's an already overdue battery replacement because I don't trust the seal after it got inflated like that and then all will be good.

It's weird what does and doesn't damage a computer. If not for the battery, I'm sure they could handle temperatures up to like 130C where the plastic casing starts to soften

Actually no, LCDs use water right? Is the limiting factor that the screen can boil?

there was a dead bug underneath the diffusor-layer of my screen. effecticely a cluster of dead pixels.

i tried to get it out with some very thin wire.

then, there was a crack in my screen.

I killed a laptop by accidentally tipping a bottle of beer on it while playing CS:GO.

I also killed a bunch of things while trying to repair them by connecting it to the outlet even though I was decently sure It's gonna fry it lol.

Last thing I did was kill a solar panel while trying to solder cables to it. Was trying to do it fast to not put a lot of heat stress on it, but the solder refused to cooperate.

Im not an electrical engineer but with each mistake I learn. I fixed more stuff than I broken at least.

I once got mad and smashed my phone on a flat-screen TV. Phone broken and screen too I found out nu turning it on later. It looked like broken glass. So phone+TV. Expensive morning

Besides that - putting in RAM while machine was on. Dead

@retoor Can that even work with normal computers? I thought mainframes needed special wiring to make hot-swapping possible.

@lorentz I have no idea. I only know now that it's not a good idea for consumer hardware

Put a laptop bag on the roof of my car. Got distracted. Drove off. Work laptop was never recovered.

They actually got me a better one after that. So, the joke at the office was that the only way to get upgraded was to throw yours out a window or something lol

@bosslogic nice. I know someone who ran over his MacBook (with a skyline) and it only suffered a broken TouchPad

@tosensei oh shit...

@bosslogic imma try this! lol

i didn't destroy it but upgraded an old windows phone with my brother. We took one speaker from a JBL box, connected the two wires with the internals of the phone and glued it to the back of the phone. it actually worked and looked pretty cool.

@jestdotty the common way batteries puff up is a chemical process triggered by a little bit of air getting into the battery, at least from what I've been told. I worried initially that the glue on the battery pack melted which lead to this kind of fault, but given that it shrank back down and it's still working, it's likely that this was a different kind of chemical process triggered by heat alone which is apparently reversible.

I'm building on very little here, perhaps one of the electrical engineers above can probably tell us more about this.

@retoor considering what it survived, should test at the range to see if it is bullet resistant.

A few of the diffusers behind my tv's panel had started to drop off leaving bright spots on my screen. Spent a couple of weeks looking up as much information as possible on how to fix it and take apart the tv. I've swapped out phone, tablet and laptop screens before so this is just bigger, right?

I finally have a day to myself, open up the tv, and the way that the ribbon cable connects the display to the main board matches none of the examples I'd found in my research, even from the same brand. The way that this board is secured means I HAVE to mess with this cable too.

I persist anyway, get the diffusers back in place, everything goes back together, I don't even have any screws inexplicably left over. Turn on the tv aaaand it's fucked. Lines everywhere, but no cracks so I'm thinking the weird ribbon cable. Didn't really have the option to replace it, so that was that.

@DamoMac Tap the screen when it's switched on, sometimes that knocks the connections back in place.

@bazmd This was mid 2020, it's long gone. I also tried tapping the screen and knocking the bottom part of the frame just be sure. It got worse.