Mac: Suddenly turns off
Me: Fuck my code..F***
Mac: No response at all
Me: reset SMC etc etc
Mac: I am dead (no battery detection, dies after 10 min on power adaptor)
Me: Skips a heart beat..(Git, oh yea git)

**Takes Mac to store, After diagnosis**

Apple Freaking Genius (AG): Your Mac has a mother board problem it needs to be replaced.
Me: Hmm what is the problem exactly??
AG: Issues in logic board and some other components.
Me: How much?
AG: Out of warranty so $$$ (60% of original amount)
Me: (wtf?) Really
AG: It's entire motherboard replacement .. bla bla

**Bring it home > open > everything seems ok on multimeter as per circuit diagram > finally finds a voltage drop that is not consistent > minute short circuit > remove > check further > nothing else > reassemble > hit power button > starts fine > freaking battery detected > works fine**

0 $ repair

Fixes two more devices @ 0 $ in friend circle

Builds a raspberry pi backup laptop with 3d printed body..Ubuntu.. you know can't live without a computer

#ThugLife #Engineer

Storytime
A story about an Android TVbox which decided to become an iPad

Several years ago we've bought an android tv-box. 

It served me and my family well for several years.

Specs are not that important in this story, but there they are:

Android 4.4 
1GB RAM
Amlogic quadcore 1.4HGz
8GB memory.

This device served us well - online TV, browsing, music, file sharing and so on. But recently cheap Chinese memory deciteed to take a break and damaged ROM. Because of that device won't boot. The only option was to take it apart and "short circuit" certain legs on memory chip and make it boot from SD card and install new firmware. After such operations tv-box worked well again. 

Hoverer, memory glitched again and again and this algorithm was repeated for several months.

But that is not what is this story about.

One day memory went completely crazy and there was no way to install new firmware on it. It just hanged on install. (BTW, it was official firmware for this device)

But after countless attempts it finally worked! It installed the firmware and booted into launcher and connected to WiFi! 

But now comes the most interesting part. 

It was not android anymore.

It decided to became an iPad.

My dad logged in to his Google account via tv-box and got mail that someboby connected from our IP via iPad (we don't have an iPad) and using safari browser! Stock browser is not safari browser.....

"Ok, nvm, crazy glitch." - we thought.

But preinstalled play marked wont launch. Because he told us, that we're trying to connect from iPad.

And Google chrome page suggested to download chrome for iPad

And everything was acting like it is an iPad.

OK, downloaded iTunes, why not??? ._.

Tried to install elixir for android via apk from flash, but then memory glitched one more time, everything went black and tv-box had damaged ROM again...

After that we decided to not torment it anymore...

That's it. Poor Android TVbox that all his life dreamed to become an iPad. Rest in peace.

To the left, a conventional circuit board design done by a human. To the right, a design done by TopoR, a software that designs circuits automatically.

It looks absolutely alien, yet beautiful. It doesn't care about how it looks, it doesn't care about angles and alignment. It only cares about efficiency and designs every connection to be as short as possible. It can even account for electric interference.

Humans just cannot compete.

this short-circuit bug is not an option lols

!rant
Four hours of work.
You think you write spaghetti code? I write spaghetti wires.
H-Bridge dual motor tester for stepper motors.
Speed is controled by pot.
H-bride are L293D.
My third board, and the first that won't go to the trash.

Question. With the baterry off the motor continues spinning with the 5v from arduino.
My question is, is the L293D suposed to do that? Or do I have a short circuit somewhere that is giving power to the motor? Meaning it can burn the arduino.
Runs a 12v stepper from a CD-Rom driver perfectly at 5v from the arduino and actually starts to act strange when I turn the 12v on. (maby the circuit it's adding 12v + 5v?)

Chinese powerbanks are so fucking dangerous. Cheap price = cheap quality. Alright, I get it, but that's not my point.
Today my dad gave me his powerbank and wanted me to upgrade it.
A 50k mAh powerbank, but it is far away from 50k mAh. He bought 12 6000mAh rechargeable batteries.
Before I started replacing it and resoldering the powerbank, I decided to open up the Chinese 50k mAh battery. A lot of aluminum foils covering the batteries. That's not great. A very high chance for a short circuit to happen.
Anyways, I carefully took the aluminum cover halfway out.
I took a (plier?) with plastic handles and grabbed the pack of batteries with it to not put myself into danger.
And BOOM! A short circuit.

Btw. It smelled very weird when I took the aluminum cover off of the pack.

3 hours making this beautiful circuit to test stepper motors.
Arduino nano + L293D + pot
Fucking bitch has a short circuit somewhere and can't find it out...
Made the same project in a breadboard in 15 minutes and it's working.
Fuck hardware bugs.
Cutted in the middle of all connections, took out excess solder... Nothing.
Fuck it, moving to the next ideia

I’m working with a “senior” developer with a full decade more experience than me who didn’t know that short-circuit evaluation works differently for OR than it does for AND. He argued with me for a good hour and a half that in the expression (a || b), b would never be evaluated if a is false — and that this couldn’t possibly be the source of the bug he was trying to fix.

🙄

Recently I disassembled this Remington beard trimmer that I have, right. Thinking that I probably just depleted the battery or something like that, and that that's why the fucking thing would turn off after 10 seconds, with a miserable motor speed that could only be caused by what.. 2.5V or something like that? So I kept up with it for a while, and then a few days ago, I finally disassembled the fucking thing.

New 4.2V LiPo battery of my own attached, wicked! The thing has a 2Ah capacity and is fully charged, so fuck all in a big ship, I'ma shave my fucking hair without protection, who cares with 2Ah anyway, given that motors at 4.2V consume only 800-ish mA, right. So I shaved my head, and figured.. holy shit mate, I fucking beat this fucking cunt, fuck you Remington! Planned obsolescence my ass!!!

Just now @xewl sent me a request that made me reconsider this shaver. Some PS3 controller, should be easy enough to fix. But I referenced my shaver so I figured that I might actually check it beforehand.

The original fucking battery has 4V left on it. 4 fucking volts! That ain't gonna trip shit for an overdischarge protection circuit!!! WHY THE FUCK REMINGTON, WHY THE FUCK DID IT (IF ANYTHING) TRIP?! And more importantly, why did you make the motor turn for only 10-ish seconds after charging, 1 year after purchase, despite the fucking cell having 4 fucking volts in it, which is more than plenty to get the thing turning for at least a 60% charge?! Planned obsolescence perhaps, hmm?

But let's say that it was bad contacts or something like that. After all, my probing was a bit intermittent, showing 1.5V (if it's shorting, shouldn't it be in the mV range?) and then 4V at times, until I separated the nickel connectors from the 16500 cell. Why the fuck should that thing short, considering that it's unprotected?! The fucking cell is unprotected, and you Remington are going to let it short? What kind of fucking engineering is that, you fucking braindead morons?!!!

And why do you use a 16500 cell which isn't very standard over a 18650 cell, which is? Again, planned obsolescence? Fucking vile pieces of shit.

Now what's more.. I tried to power on the shaver for a picture for this fucking rant, using a LiPo cell of my own that I used to shave my hair with the other day, to get a nice picture of my little hack. But the fucking thing, despite having 3.89V left in it after that fucking shave, which is more than plenty for a lithium cell, the fucking unit doesn't power on. WHAT THE FUCK REMINGTON?!! That's planned obsolescence at its best, init?!! You vile fucking pieces of shit.

So I guess that this rant is no more one of "I beat these Remington cunts". It is one of "you can bet your fucking ass that planned obsolescence is a thing!!"

My godmother asked me to repair her PC... so when opening the case i realized that her "shady"(improvised wires) case fan was not working... so i tried to connect its molex wire to the psu, and realized i neded an wire adaptor because the psu could not support that fan(only had one molex, female, not male and female), but I gave it a try... long story short... I SHORT-CIRCUITED THE PC...(but it restarted after 10 minutes of me dying of fear that i destroyed her pc...)

I like model railways. I also like embedded electronics.

I therefore enjoy combining the two in my free time quite a bit - putting arm processors on trains and getting them to do cool stuff. I'm also happy to dish out electronics advice to other model railway guys, a lot of whom are older and have literally no clue (but will create stunningly realistic scenes that are a million miles away from my lowly efforts.)

But bloody hell - is it hard to do so without being drowned out by incompetent sods who think they know it all because... reasons. I think I may just stop attempting to help beyond this point. This is the latest nugget I've had to contend against - I guess he's heard about skin effect, but since DCC works at around 8Khz and using anything more than 1.5mm core cable is ridiculous for a model railway, even that is complete baloney.

Other electrical nuggets I've heard from this group include "only washing machines run on AC, everything else is DC", "the colour of the wire matters otherwise it could short circuit", and "driving your old trains with a DCC signal will make them run better, because it's more modern". 😬

after 21 years today was the day i let go of my personal homepage.

still don't know whether this is just a depressive short circuit action or at least reducing channels of unfulfilled socialisation.

Hey guys
I think I just burned 2 Nanos.
I'm using a 30W soldering Iron and had to resolder the pins of one and solder the pins of a new one.
Now they don't work. One allows for code upload but won't turn on, other seams to have a short circuit.
Could have I burned the circuits due to a 30W soldering iron?
Also used a little of flux on the pins, can flux pass energy and make bridges?
Thanks

For 2 hours I've been looking for the reason why my mouse and external hard drives suddenly stop working, just to find out that my external USB hub is junk and caused a short circuit that disabled all the USB ports on my laptop.

USB Hub (Logitech, $30) replaced with a cheap one from China ($1). Now everything works again.

I corrupted a raspberry pi, and while debugging the issue, plugged it in and placed it on my metal desk by mistake, which caused it to short circuit and stop working completely.

So there are consequences to being an experimenter. Currently trying to develop my own smarthome, and last night, I was fixing up some lights. Just soldered some wires together, and hung it up by the outlet on the wall. And it worked!

But I didn't want it to just hang, so I moved it around a bit. And obviously because of my shitty soldering job, not really insulating anything, I created a short circuit, sparks everywhere, and blew a fuse in the electrical box. No problem, I'll just replace the fuse.. Except I didn't have any lying around, and it was 1am...

So I had to get up at 8am when the stores opened, and buy some fuses. Couldn't fall asleep again, so I started cleaning my apartment (I've possibly gone crazy from the electrical shock), and now I'm in my 3:30pm till midnight shift...

The moment when you short circuit a new 1TB disk because the the external disk case has on one side conductive bumpers (I think for ESD purpose) ... Who designs this shit? D:

The universe has taken a cactus.

It proceeded to gift the cactus with a toxin that greatly enhances the stimulus of pain.

After the universe watched it's miraculous creation it decided to shove it up so far my arse that my gag reflex turned on and I puked a lot of cactus.

Didn't sleep well, weekend hardware migration finish, today an old server got moved.

Some part, most likely the redundant PSU, had a short circuit - decided to take the switches out... Which are the only non redundant hardware...

There was only one critical system in the whole rack, that was one redundant firewall.

Guess what happened..... Naaaa?

*drum roll*

For whatever reason, the second firewall didn't kick in, so large part of internal network unreachable as VPN was on the firewall.

:thumbsup:

That's not cactus level yet.

Spontaneously a large part of the work at home crew decided to call, cause getting an email wasn't enough.

So while all the phones were ringing and we had the joyful fun to carefully take apart a whole rack to check for possible faulty wiring / electric burns / hardware damage and getting firewall up and running again...

Some dev decided to run a deployment (doable as one of the few working at the company at the moment -.-).

I work from home, but we had a conference phone call running the whole time so I could "deescalate" and keep others up-to-date. So me on headphone with conference call, regular phone for calls, while typing mails / sms for de-escalation.

Now we're reaching cactus level, cause being tortured by being annoyed out of hell by all telephone ringing, the beeping of UPS (uninterruptible power supplies), the screaming of admins from the server room and the roaring of air coolers…

Suddenly said dev must have stood in the midst of the chaos… and asked for help cause "the deployment broke, project XY is offline"...

I think it was the first time since years that I screamed at the top of my lungs.

Bad idea (health issues)… but oh boy was it a pleasure to hear my own voice echo through the conference speaker and creating an echoic sound effect.

It was definitely worth coughing out my loungs for the next hour and I think it was the best emotional outburst ever.

I feel a bit sorry for the dev, but only a tiny bit.

After the whole rack thing, the broken deployment fixing and the "my ears are bleeding and I think I will never be able to talk again" action...

We had to roll out several emergency deployments to fix CVEs (eg libexpat).

This day was a marvelous shit show.

I will now cry myself to sleep with some codein.

Still waiting...

Any recommendations for introductory books on electrical engineering? I'm looking for something that goes into detail on the basics: tension, current, resistance, inductance, capacitance, etc. I have very little knowledge on the subject (I know what the basic components do and that's it) and I found myself struggling a bit with the most basic concept: voltage.

I grabbed my multimeter, a few resistors and a battery and played around a bit. For some reason it doesn't really "click" why on a 5v circuit with 3 2.2k ohm resistors (I think) the voltage around each resistor was like ~1.3 volts or something, while on a circuit with 2 resistors the voltage accross each one was ~2.3 something volts (I don't remember exact values). Like, I know that voltage is a difference in potential, but I still don't get it and idk what I'm missing. Why is the difference in potential accross a resistor different if the circuit has 2 resistors in series instead of 3. It kinda makes sense in my head but at the same time it doesn't.

In short, I want to know the "why" stuff works the way it does, not just the "how".

Also, if the book covers common practices, components, and circuits that'd be very helpful. I want to learn how to build well-designed, reliable and safe circuits.

Was raging that my new earphones already got a short circuit only to realize that I didn’t put the other ear in....

I'm sitting here in the dark and can't program because no electricians are available... Right before a deadline...

I worked on refactoring my code for our University lab's project (I am the programmer assigned to it) for almost a week and managed to refactor most of my old and unorganized code. Today I finally had the chance to finish the job.
While everything was open I decided to charge my laptop (I work on a desktop) and the moment I plugged it in the room turned dark. I realized I just have to turn the fuse back on but of course all the fuses are on already. Appearantly that short-circuit fried my home's electrical framework somehow and because it's a weekend I can't get in touch with any electricians.

All my code was committed but not pushed so now I am stuck here before a deadline with no way to work...

tl;dr Because of a short-circuit I don't have any electricity and all my work is unpushed.

Sometimes the world does not make sense to me.. It's like my matrix got restarted and while restarting due to some short circuit all the human beings around my clusters has turned into absolute fuckwits...

I have a mini laptop ( i-ball CompBook Excelance). I want to add an extra monitor to it for coding purpose. Can I do it? Someone suggested me not to do so as monitor would require more power which this laptop will not be able to provide and would result in a short circuit. Is it so that I can't add a monitor to this kind of mini laptop? If it's possible then tell me the kind of monitor to add and it's procedure.

Also it has a 2gb sdRAM. Can I run Android Studio in that? Or can I add more RAM to it?

I know I have asked too many questions here! But please help me guys coz I think that this is the platform where I'll get answers to all my queries. The people I am surrounded with are not worthy to ask such questions. Please help!

Thanks in advance!