Ejaad-Nama 0x0E: Your Right To Repair

Ejaad-Nama (Urdu: Letters of Invention). A fortnight newsletter about Science, Electronics, Makers, DIY, and everything technical. We talk about lemons, acid batteries, and anything in between.

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The thing about entropy in life is that it will always increase. Nothing remains constant as life keeps losing its order. The earth keeps getting hotter. The population keeps increasing. But this gradual increase in “chaos” is evident in daily life too: The light bulbs die out. The car tire keeps wearing out. The chrome tabs on my devices keep increasing and the free memory keeps reducing. The battery capacities reduce over time. The cars keep requiring more and more maintenance.

In a nutshell, the things around us will keep on breaking, Unless you keep your beer stein in a locker. And it seems, we as humans prefer to replace than to repair. As with industrialization, we have come to be really efficient at making things. We just don’t know how to get rid of them.

This thought hit me recently when I accidentally (read: clumsily, please don’t tell my wife) broke a very thick glass jug of a food blender. The price of the food blender is around 76 Euros. But of course, the manufacturer does not sell the jug alone but you could buy a glass jug for that model from a third party at 70 Euros plus 6.90 for shipping. I think the manufacturer wants me to buy a new blender, I may be wrong though🤷‍♂️. But I feel everyone at some point has had a parallel experience which is where the Right to Repair becomes an important movement.

The Right to Repair

… And the Right to Repair or not!

Getting things repaired in the past used to be possible. Typical examples include cleaning up the head of the VCR or changing the battery of your NOKIA 3310 phone. Most of the parts of these electronics could be sourced from anywhere. If more complicated issues came up, going to a neighborhood repair shop could fix your phone speaker in a jiffy.

Let me give you another example: One of my colleagues has a very old function generator. Most of the components of the function generator could be bought and replaced with rudimentary engineering tools. He was also able to download a full schematic of the function generator. These function generators are purely analog and have no software.

I can compare that to current lab equipment in my office which comes with a lot of software features. These have to be sent to authorized repair shops because the firmware would not allow us to repair the machine.

Similarly last week I replaced the screen of the old iPhone I had laying around for some time. It is impossible to get any official documentation for device repair except for ifixit guide. Officially, Apple charges $149 to repair the screen excluding shipping. I decided to do that on my own. If you don’t go through the guide and try to open on your own, high chances you could damage one of the hinges. I was able to repair the phone at $65 but you can easily find cheaper screens on Ali express. That is less than half of what Apple charges.

The important thing to note is how one is not able to see/access any of the components. The screws to hold things in place are very specific (there are 1.3 mm and 1.1 mm screws), flimsy connectors that can break with just a bit of extra force, and well-hidden components making sourcing replacement parts difficult. Most of the electronics components cannot be bought by a private individual as manufacturers are only allowed to supply to Apple. I do understand all these special components make the phone thinner and packed tighter, but I do feel that there are certain design choices which just makes repair even more difficult.

Louiss Rossman is a famous Right to Repair activist and YouTuber making educational repair videos. He explains the Right to Repair quickly in this video and many of the similar things I touched upon above.

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3d Printing for Repairs

Small damages can make a huge difference and render the product useless. Recently, I have been doing these repairs using 3d printing and breathing a new soul into the lifeless product.

One of the repairs I did for a friend was an enclosure of a control unit of an e-bike. The enclosure houses a control unit that controls the motor of the bike and displays ride statistics. However, wet weather conditions can cause damage to the whole control unit due to the broken enclosure. Again: it seems you could only buy the whole control unit but not the enclosure itself.

Instead of replicating the current design, I decided to design a GoPro mount styled enclosure for the bike. It was a 2-hour design job followed by a 5-hour print job.

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Thoughts on Right of Repair by Aqeel ⚒ Arshad

I support "my right to fix/hack/bust" the electronic devices for a long time now. Ever since I was a child, I was always fascinated to open my toys, and slowly this fascination turned into my hobby to fix any broken electronics. It's always fun to first open the broken and sometimes even not broken yet devices to see how were they manufactured.

Let me tell you my way of fixing the devices and it works most of the time. Electronic items break with wear and tear and most of the time a normal user would think the device is broken and it must be thrown away. In reality, most of the time the broken devices could be fixed fairly easily. To fix a device, one can always start with simple steps, e.g. replacing batteries, fuses, wires, etc. If it's still not working, one has to open it up and look at what's inside. This is where things get a bit difficult and need some experience. Manufacturers often don't like it. Here, for example, I have tried to fix a broken IR-Thermometre but could not bring it back to life as the MCU chip was hidden under the epoxy resin which is usually done to save the cost of packaging of Integrated circuit.

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💡 Tips for Electronics Engineer #2

Use a PMOS as reverse polarity protection with minimal losses to ensure the wrongly connected battery or power supply does not damage your circuit or product.

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