Going to Macworld? We Are

January 23, 2012 Events, Site News — Elizabeth

This weekend, we’ll be in San Francisco at Macworld | iWorld, the annual Apple fan convention held from January 26-28 at the Moscone Center. We’ll be presenting at three events on Thursday and will have an informal meet-up in Oakland on Friday evening. If you’ll be attending, come say hi!

Thursday, Jan. 26, 10-10:45 a.m.
TechTalk: The Doctor is In!
Room 2011

Have a broken iPod lying around? Bring in your broken Apple hardware. Kyle, Luke, and the iFixit team will be joined by folks from the Fixit Clinic to diagnose, troubleshoot, and repair Apple devices. We’ll help diagnose your issues and figure out what needs fixing. We’ll provide a workspace, troubleshooting tools and equipment, expert advice, and even parts for some common repairs. Come pick the brains of our Apple experts, or share your repair victories with like-minded DIYers. We’ll bring a selection of parts to fix many common iPod and iPhone problems on the spot, including failing batteries and cracked screens.

Thursday, Jan. 26, 11-11:45 a.m.
Hardware Repair Showcase
MacWorld.com Stage (in the expo area)

Come learn how to do some cool and easy upgrades on Apple devices! We’ll show you how to replace the back of your iPhone with a transparent rear panel to show off its beautiful insides, how to put a second hard drive in your Mac Mini, and how to replace your laptop’s optical drive with a hard drive.

Thursday, Jan. 26, 5-7:30 p.m.
RapidFire: A Crash Course on Apple Repair—iFixit Shares the Basics of Repairing Your Apple Hardware
Room 2006

RapidFire is a series of five-minute talks, each of which will teach one thing quickly and effectively. In our five-minute RapidFire talk, we’ll show you the best tricks and tips to troubleshoot, get inside, and repair your Apple products. We’ll demonstrate how to handle water damage, bad reception on an iPhone, and ways to get inside devices with the right tools and tricks. Come join us for a quick, visual demonstration to better inform you with the basics of Apple repair knowledge.

If that’s not enough iFixit for your weekend, we also invite you to join us Friday, January 27 at 7 p.m. for shop talk, food, and drinks at the awesome Oakland technology salon Tech Liminal (268 14th St., Oakland, CA 94612). Fixit Clinic people will be there, too. No worries if you don’t have a car—Tech Liminal is pretty close to the 12th St. Oakland City Center BART stop. Please email meetup@ifixit.com to RSVP!

Hope to see you there.

Announcing iFixit.org: The People Who Are Fixing the World

January 19, 2012 Activism, Repair Stories, Site News — Kyle

iFixit has been helping people fix their stuff since 2003, with free, easy-to-use, step-by-step repair guides for all sorts of hardware—from electronics to automobiles. We believe in taking control of the devices you own by opening them up and tinkering with their insides. Our vision? A world where everyone has free access to repair manuals for everything. We make it easy, with our guide-creation software, for people to share their repair knowledge with the world.

On this new site, we, the iFixit team, will share the philosophy behind our work, some of the repair stories that we’ve historically been posting on iFixit.com, as well as posts from guests on similar sustainability issues.

(more…)

STOP SOPA+PIPA

January 18, 2012 Activism, Site News — Bob

Many of you are already aware that many of your favorite websites have gone dark or posted censorship warnings today. Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, Imgur, and Craigslist, among a slew of others, are protesting U.S. legislation that would significantly impact the freedom of the internet.

iFixit stands with them.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) are pieces of legislation currently under consideration by the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, respectively. Both bills lack the correct technical language to do what they intend (you know, actually stop piracy), and instead are vulnerable to overly broad interpretation that could seriously impact the innovation, freedom, and secure operation of the internet.

There are plenty of places where you can get an in-depth analysis of what’s wrong with the bills, so we’ll keep it simple. These are the ways in which SOPA and PIPA would directly impact our operations here at iFixit:

  • Blocking our free, open-source content.
    For censorship purposes, SOPA/PIPA define sites as “domestic” or “foreign” based on their domain name, not their actual base of operations. While iFixit.com is a U.S. domestic domain name and company, we use a Content Distribution Network (CDN) to serve you images and other page content when you view a guide. The CDN finds the geographically-closest server to you so the page loads fast. Based on the loose definition in the bill, some of your guide may be “domestic” and some of it may be “foreign.” Guide images and other content could be inadvertently blocked by blanket domain blacklisting.
  • Teaching repair could be rendered illegal.
    According to the language in the bill, facilitation of criminal violations are enough to get you in trouble. This means that helping users with troublesome DVD region restrictions or tearing down an FBI tracking device could get us in legal hot water. Worse yet, we’ve opened up our site for users to submit and edit their own guides, and we’ve built a community of people who love to help others fix things. All of the work, content, and contributions would be put in jeopardy if the two bills are enacted. Since teaching the world how to do stuff is kind of our bag, this would significantly stifle our mission of teaching the world how to fix everything.

In fact, it’s questionable that iFixit could have even succeeded in a post-SOPA world. We started in a dorm room in 2003 by writing repair manuals for electronics made by a certain big Silicon Valley company because they weren’t publicly available. If we’d chosen a hip “Web 2.0″ domain like iFix.it (FYI, not us!), our site would be considered foreign even though it hails from the U.S. If a certain big Silicon Valley company didn’t like what we were up to, they could have filed a complaint and had our website blocked in the U.S. Game over.

Please take the time to call or write your representatives and let them know how you feel about SOPA and PIPA. It’s difficult for them to make the best decisions for us if they don’t know how we feel, so take a step back from the keyboard (Reddit’s down anyway), pick up your phone, and SPEAK UP!

Correlated Magnets

January 16, 2012 Hardware, Site News — Phillip

You probably didn’t know that we here at iFixit have a knack for magic. Today, you’ll bear witness to that fact. We’re going to share one of our greatest feats of magical genius with you. Drum roll, please… Behold! Levitating magnets! (ooh, ahh.)

Hovering magnets!

What, not impressed? What’s not impressive about magnets repelling each other? Well, if that doesn’t impress you, check this out.

Hovering magnet, upside down?

Ta-Da! That’s right: those magnets are hovering, yet not completely separating; now that’s impressive! But how’s this possible, you may ask? Shouldn’t the magnets either stick together or completely repel each other?

This isn’t an optical illusion (or Photoshop magic), but science! The pictured magnets are not the ordinary kind you’d get at the local hardware store, but correlated magnets developed by Correlated Magnetics Research, or CMR. But before we delve into the details surrounding correlated magnets, let’s revisit how good old-fashioned magnets work.

A quick lesson in magnet basics: there are two sides to a typical magnet, a “North” pole and a “South” pole. Putting opposite poles together will cause an attraction force (akin to Paula Abdul and a tomcat). Putting same poles together will cause a repulsive force. And proximity affects the strength of these forces—the general rule is that the closer the magnets are, the stronger the forces. These forces can sometimes be so strong that it is impossible for the average person to cause contact between same poles, or separate opposite poles. And the vast majority of magnets out there have one North and one South pole.

A correlated magnet has the unique characteristic of having alternating North and South poles on one side, resulting in simultaneous attract and repel forces. The poles can be built such that we achieve our “magic” above, where there is enough repulsive force to prevent contact—but still enough attractive force to keep the magnets close. Check out how different they can appear from standard magnets when viewed on magnetic viewing film:

Standard (left) and correlated (right) magnets. The light green lines are pole boundaries.

Levitation isn’t the only thing these magnets are good for, however. CMR provided us with several different kinds of correlated magnets, each with unique pole designs that gives them varying attractive and repulsive properties. For example, some magnets were designed so that when two red dots on the handles were aligned, a great amount of force was required to separate them. But when we twisted the magnets and misaligned the red dots, the magnets were much easier to separate.

The attraction force between the two magnets is several magnitudes higher when the red dots are lined up.

The attraction force between the two magnets is several magnitudes higher when the red dots are lined up.

Different pole designs result in different magnet interactions.

So these magnets can make a fun “magic” trick for the kids and would probably make a decent conversation piece in the living room of physicists and engineers, but what are their application in the real world?

Take a home deadbolt lock as an example. When you turn the lock with your fingers, it pushes a rod into the door frame to prevent the door from opening. But you wouldn’t need a deadbolt lock with correlated magnets. They could be used so that two disks would hold the door in the “open” position with a 5 lb force. But when the magnet on the door was turned 90 degrees, it would align more attractive poles and fewer repulsive poles, resulting in a 500 lb force “locked” door.

Too humdrum for you? Instead, how about using them in levitating vehicles? A properly programmed correlated magnet can provide enough repulsive force to keep the heaviest vehicles afloat, but simultaneously provide an attractive force that could mitigate undesired takeoffs. This magnet technology is also under research for use with NASA telescopes, and even the medical world is looking into using correlated magnets in joint replacements.

While not in mass production yet, this cool technology has the power to significantly affect how we construct mechanical systems. We’re excited to see how correlated magnets will be implemented in future products!

DIY Christmas Lights

December 24, 2011 Meet iFixit — Bob

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all over the house
The lights were flashing like crazy, thanks to Carl Friedrich Gauss.

Here at iFixit, we’re natural tinkerers, tweakers, and fixers. Many of us spend our free time on side projects and activities which could only be described to normal people as “crazy” or “insane”. Mine happens to bring Christmas cheer to local family and friends, so I thought I’d share it with all of you this year as well. And it probably falls into the “crazy” category.

The Christmas lights I’ve put up at my parents house for the past few years would make Clark Griswold proud. Yes, it’s one of those displays where the lights flash in sync with the music.

Now I could have gone out and purchased an off-the-shelf solution (like a Light-O-Rama system), but that’s just not how I roll. It would be way more fun to build this thing myself! So back in fall of 2008, armed with nothing more than a bit of money and a half-complete bachelors degree in Computer Engineering, I set off to build my own animated Christmas lights show.

Like all good engineers, I started by doing research. Lots and lots of research. I had plenty of experience building digital systems that ran on DC power at a friendly 5 volts, but controlling 32 channels of Christmas lights running on 120V AC power was new to me, and the last thing I wanted to do was burn down my parents’ house for Christmas.

After reading a few scattered articles I’d found around the web, I stumbled upon the Do It Yourself Christmas forums. DIY Christmas is a place for light show tinkerers to meet up, share experiences, and provide tips on everything from hardware controllers to sequencing music. These were my kind of people!

I opted to design my own controller rather than get in on a group-buy for an existing design. To save time, I decided to piggy back on the FPGA board I’d already learned how to use in school. I just needed to design a peripheral board that would let me control 32 channels of lights.

The FPGA board on the left receives lighting information from a computer via the serial cable for each of the 32 channels. Each channel is represented by a single byte, where 0-255 represents 0% – 100% brightness. After decoding each channel, it controls 32 outputs which travel over to the board on the right. For each of the 32 channels, the board on the right will show its status on an LED and send it out to the yard over a standard Cat 5 Ethernet cable.

That bridge board in the middle? That’s a painful reminder that no matter how rushed you are to get something done, you should always double check things you use from the internet. I happened to find a PCB design for the large connector that someone had been kind enough to post on their blog, which saved me a lot of design time because that connector has 50 pins on it. Unfortunately, the original author had connected all the pins backwards, so pin 1 was actually pin 50, pin 2 was actually pin 49, and so on. That bridge board was something I threw together quickly to reverse all the pins on the connector.

Out in the yard, there are 8 electrical gang boxes, each of which has four outlets. These four outlets are individually controlled by the four channels that come in over the Ethernet cable. The power itself doesn’t come over the Ethernet cable, though. The Cat 5 wire inside is so tiny that it can’t handle powering the lights, so there’s a small board inside each gang box called a solid state relay.

The control signal over Ethernet is just 5V and a couple milliamps. This needs to switch 120V at several amps, depending on how many strands of lights I have plugged into the outlet. This calls for a relay, which is basically just an electronically-controlled switch. When my low-voltage control electronics trigger the relay, it opens the floodgates for the wall socket power to come through. This lets you control big-power things with small-power electronics.

An important part of this setup are those tiny square black chips in the picture. Those are opto-isolators, and they’re pretty clever little chips. The last thing I want is a stray power surge in my high-voltage circuits to get into my low-voltage circuits, because that would most certainly destroy a lot of expensive electronics. Those chips allow you to keep the two sides safely isolated. When the low-voltage side triggers the opto-isolator, it turns on a tiny LED inside the chip. That LED triggers a photodetector, which turns on the high-voltage side of the circuit. The two circuits are linked, but completely electrically isolated from each other. Cool beans!

The last piece of the puzzle is sequencing the lights to music. Thanks to the hard work of a fellow DIYer,  Vixen is freely available software for doing just that . It even has a plug-in system if you want to make it run your own custom-built controllers, like I did.

It’s been a lot of work getting the display up and running. Sourcing parts, designing logic boards, writing embedded control software, plugging in all the lights, and sequencing the show certainly takes quite a time commitment, but seeing the smiles on peoples faces when they watch it makes all the work well worth the effort every year.

From our epilepsy-inducing houses to yours, have a very happy holidays and a wonderful new year!

But I heard him exclaim, as he drove out of sight
Merry Christmas to all, and to all some bright lights.

Holiday Gift Guide

December 13, 2011 Hardware, Tools — Miro

Alright, friends. It’s that time of year again—to reach into the pocketbook, bust out the pepper spray, and face the hordes of maniacal shoppers.

But wait! You may not need pepper spray this year. We want to make it easy for you to get gifts for your loved ones. We’ve drafted a list of top-notch gifts and stocking stuffers for the tech- and repair-folk dear to you.

What’s even better than a list of great stuff to buy? If it were free. Well, how about the fact that it’s all available right here on iFixit? Spare yourself a chaotic trip to the mall and check out our goodies right now. If that’s not reason enough, check out MJ’s assessment of our holiday wares:

 

 

New Pro Tech Base Toolkit

December 13, 2011 Hardware, Site News, Tools — Kyle

Our Pro Tech Base Toolkit has been a hot item ever since we released it last year — repair techs, DIYers, single-parent moms, and even secretive 3-letter agencies have used them to open their devices.

Not content to rest on our laurels, we’ve spent a year asking our teardown specialists, customers, repair shops, and tool geeks worldwide how to make it better. We paid close attention to their advice, and we’re excited to announce our new 54 Bit Driver Kit and Pro Tech Base Toolkit!

So what’s new? First, we’ve substantially improved our 54 Bit Driver Kit. Some highlights include:

  • Pentalobe bits to open and repair popular Apple devices such as the iPhone 4, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro.
  • T7 through T20 security bits to fit Torx security screws with a pin in the center.
  • A full line of metric nut drivers.
  • JIS bits to fit the screws found in digital cameras, R/C helicopters, and other high-end electronics.
  • A custom 1/4″ to 4 mm adapter to allow our 4 mm precision bits to be used in standard 1/4″ screwdrivers with larger handles, ratcheting handles, or torque drivers.
  • A 60 mm extension that doubles as a T-handle, making it easy to get extra torque and remove stubborn screws.

We’ve kept all the great features of our driver kit including the precision machined, magnetized driver and a full complement of flathead, tri-wing, Phillips, Torx, and hex bits.

MJ provides a nice overview of the new 54 Bit Driver Kit here:

While our 54 Bit Driver Kit is the most capable electronics repair screwdriver set on the planet, getting inside many devices requires more than just a screwdriver. That’s where our Pro Tech Base Toolkit comes in. We’ve carefully selected the components to include the most useful tools for releasing tabs, disconnecting connectors, getting into tight spaces, and picking up small parts. To keep everything portable and well-organized, we designed an all-new tool roll to house everything.

Kit contents:

Want to see more? Watch MJ show off the new Pro Tech Base Toolkit:

We’re offering the Pro Tech Base Toolkit at a very affordable $59.95, and we’re also selling the upgraded 54 Bit Driver Kit set for just $24.95. Give the gift of sweet repair success to your loved ones this Christmas.

University Technical Writing Project

December 6, 2011 Site News — Miro

Several thousand user-contributed repair guides have been published on our site since we released our repair guide creator to the world. And that’s no coincidence. We’ve been working with the English department at Cal Poly since September 2009 to develop a technical writing curriculum centered around a device repair manual. In fact, students from across the nation are responsible for the majority of user-created content on our site; a total of eight universities now peruse the iFixit project.

The curriculum requires a group of technical writing students to document how to repair a device — either one provided by iFixit, or one of their own choosing. In return, iFixit provides the tools, materials, and instructions for the students to successfully take apart and photograph a device. The entire curriculum (including tips on photography, writing style, and deliverables that need to be turned in) is hosted on iFixit, so students have access to it anytime, anywhere.

After two years of development, we’ve seen tremendous benefits for everyone involved:

  • Students make a noble contribution by writing guides for real electronic devices, all the while learning modern communication techniques by using pictures and text to relay what they learn.
  • Students have a clear set of deliverables that they can show off to family and friends, and even put on their resume at the end of the term.
  • Professors gain access to an easily-startable, easily-maintainable project. Our collaboration with Cal Poly helped us develop several tools for professors that make it easy to keep track of students’ contributions during the school term.
  • The world has yet another open-source repair manual that can be used to fix the device.

 

Student group shows how to adjust the derailleur on a bike.

Student group shows how to adjust the derailleur on a bike.

The vast majority of student contributions result in fully usable, well-written guides. And given our flexibility with project devices, we’ve published everything from a stellar PSP 2000 repair manual to a great set of repair guides for a Volvo 740.

With the help of Cal Poly, Ohio State University, CSU Los Angeles, University of Maryland, Cuesta College, James Madison University, University of Wisconsin Stout, and University of Maine, we’ve been able to publish over 350 student-authored service manuals (comprising over 2,000 guides). That’s a great start, but there are still thousands of devices that require repair manuals.

We would love to include other universities across the United States. Our online-based program easily scales to accommodate several more schools that might be interested in our program. So if you know of a professor or other faculty member at your local university and think they might benefit from collaborating with iFixit, please send them our way!

Samsung Galaxy Nexus Teardown

November 29, 2011 Hardware, Site News, Teardowns — Miro

Thanks to some wonderful folks in the UK, we got our hands on the elusive Samsung Galaxy Nexus even before its release date has been announced on our side of the pond.

And we’re glad that it’s here, as it contains some features we’ve never before seen in a smartphone.

Sadly, it’s not all fun and games. The phone is a bit difficult to get into, and glass replacement is costly due to the glass being fused to both AMOLED display as well as a display frame. So, either get good with a heat gun or just don’t drop the phone. Consequently, the Galaxy Nexus received a mid-pack 6 out of 10 repairability score.

Teardown highlights:

  • Not only does the 3.7 V, 1750 mAh battery power the phone, but the user manual states that it also doubles as the NFC antenna. Of course, we had to see this one for ourselves, so we peeled apart the battery. Lo and behold, there’s a sweet antenna hiding underneath the battery’s shiny wrapper.
  • If you ever want to buy a replacement battery (and keep NFC functional), ensure that the battery has the antenna. Our battery says “Near Field Communication” on it, so that might be a good indicator if it will function as an NFC antenna.
  • The 5 megapixel rear-facing camera is optimized for low light conditions and has a handy continuous auto-focus feature that’ll surely help keep those quick moments clear. If you prefer moving pictures, this camera can capture full HD 1080p “talkies.” We weren’t that impressed with the camera during our five-minute pre-teardown test, but that’s just our impression.
  • The front-facing camera allows for video chat and will take pictures at 1.3 MP or videos at 720p. Pretty standard stuff nowadays. But, the cool part is that is also has a Winbond 8 Mb Serial Flash Memory unit in line to help it buffer all the data it collects.
  • The rear speaker pops off the motherboard without much effort. The ability to replace individual components inside the Galaxy Nexus is always great, since this will make some repairs less costly.
  • The primary internals of the Galaxy Nexus are contained on two L-shaped boards that are held together by soldered wires from the vibrator motor. We found the following chips:
  • Texas Instruments TWL6040 8-Channel High Quality Low-Power Audio Codec
  • Texas Instruments TWL6030 Fully Integrated Power Management with Switch Mode Charger
  • Invensense MPU-3050 Motion Processing Unit
  • Intel XG626 Baseband Modem
  • RFMD RF6260 Quad-band Multimode Power Amplifier Module
  • Samsung K3PE7E700M 512 MB DDR2 SDRAM
  • Samsung KMVYL000LM Multichip Memory Package, which we believe to house an additional 512 MB of RAM in addition to the main processor.
  • Samsung SWB-B42 BT 4.0 Dual Band Wlan FM Tx/Rx. Chipworks says the module is actually manufactured by Murata, and houses a Broadcom BCM4330 die inside.
  • NXP 65N00 Smart Card IC. According to Chipworks, this two-die package houses an MCU and a PN544 NFC controller.
  • The chip labeled as 274 U141 031 hides the Bosch BMP180 MEMS Pressure Sensor, which should be responsible for the “barometer” feature inside the Nexus. The Bosch BMP180 is identified by its markings CMD 173 as noted by our friends at Chipworks.
Checking out the wire bonds in the Bosch BMP180 MEMS Pressure Sensor

Checking out the wire bonds in the Bosch BMP180 MEMS Pressure Sensor

Final layout

Final layout

iPhone 4S Transparent Rear Panels

November 28, 2011 Site News — luke

iPhone 4S Transparent Rear Panel

Update (12/6): We’re now selling the 4S and 4 GSM transparent panels individually. We’re putting more in stock as fast as we can. If we’re sold out, click “Notify me” on the product page and we’ll email you as soon as they’re back in stock.

Apple designs amazing products—inside and out. The internals of the iPhone are absolutely gorgeous, but Apple keeps them covered up! We’re proud to announce our iPhone 4S transparent back panel. Now you can have the coolest iPhone on the block!

The glass panel looks absolutely gorgeous, and we can’t wait to see them on iPhones everywhere. To kick the new product off in style, we’ve put together a special introductory package:

These items normally sell for over $50, but today (11/28) we’re offering the entire package for only $29.95. Supplies are limited. Once we run out of packages, we’ll continue selling the back panel for $29.95.

If you haven’t upgraded to a 4S yet, we’ve also got a package with iPhone 4 GSM panels.

Installing the panel takes seconds—just remove two screws with the included screwdriver, slide the back panel off, and slide the new one on. We’ve even made step-by-step instructions to show you the way.

This is an incredible Christmas gift for your geeky friends.