Your finest bodge (that works) - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: October 17, 2016, 07:07:25 am
content: The reason I'm creating this thread is that I'm currently writing to you while my big beefy desktop PC is connected via a 10Mbps Ethernet hub. My server room and home network wiring is still a work in progress which means I don't have Ethernet ports to all the rooms yet. The nearest working port to the rest of my network is about 15 metres away. Of course I didn't have a cable long enough and the only spare device I had was a3Com OfficeConnect Hub 8/TPM.I did have a Wi-Fi card in this machine, but I donated it to a friend who needed it more.It looks bloody ugly with cables running across the floor and it's bloody slow, but as Dave would say: Winner winner, chicken dinner!(Hands up who remembers network collisions?)

author: 2N3055
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 17, 2016, 07:27:13 am
content: Quote from: Halcyon on October 17, 2016, 07:07:25 amAnd I feel old now...

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 17, 2016, 07:38:24 am
content: As I would imagine everybody here would sayHow much time do you got?Things that come to mind is a perfect 10/10 GPU and AIO Watercooler mounting in my PChttps://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx-7TCgzh8ITZ19lNFBVSjhmOVE/view?usp=sharinghttps://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx-7TCgzh8ITMFZfWGJPR0Z4YWM/view?usp=sharingThe GPU is holding the watercooler up and vice versa (Sorta like a strange brace arrangement, the board and GPU cooler is between the fans, and as you can see in the second picture I have twisty ties (without the plastic) holding the cooler up too.For a cheapie window fan I took an old NZXT laptop cooler and soldered the 12v inputs to a 13.5v AC-DC wall wart (You turn it on by plugging it in)I tried to bodge a Nintendo DS Liion pack into a Gameboy Advance SP by deconstructing the pack and attempting to move the terminals (I busted not only the DS battery, but also the Gameboy entirely).I tried to repair it with a new motherboard, and to my surprise there are two different pinouts for the display, so my display now looks like shit, and the only way to sort of fix the colours is by hitting the backlight off button (Which I lost of course, so I need something to push the membrane) and then it sort of looks half decent (Useable)I also have a 500 somthing Watt ATX PSU that didn't have the connectors I wanted (including only having a 4 pin CPU connector.) So I harvested cables from old PSUs, and I did a Frankenstein job (it's a good PSU, couldn't toss it) so it now has more SATA, less molex, and an 8 pin CPU (it had a 4 pin, got the rest off some molex connectors, just needed a tad more) connector.I also have a Theramin over in my music studio (more of a music area in a larger room), which has a weird almost like a broomstick connector on the bottom. Nothing fit it so it is currently sitting on a mike boom with plastic wrap over it so it will fit.I also broke a key on my casio CTK-700, it has single mold key sets (3-4 keys a set) so I just moved the broken key over. Similarly my music computer has some stuff on it, arrange in a tower from bottom to top as followsparticleboard4U Server1U ServerA deck slat and the other half of the particleboard (previously from an old model train set's table) with the music computer (tower) next to it.the slat and board hold a short side table (previously a sidetable for an old couch) that has a LCD 4:3 dell panel, keyboard, and mouse on it (and a USB hub I ripped out of aforementioned laptop cooler)Which one of these are the best? Idk. They are all the worst.

author: VulcanBB18
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: October 17, 2016, 08:00:19 am
content: Oooo a topic just for me!I consider almost everything I do a bodge to one degree or another, I'm a impatient tightarse with little spare $$, so bodge all the way!Case in point - here is my "test rig" for the Sony D70P camera you can see back of shot...which of course I scored for freeUSB video capture dongle (see if you can see it wrapped with masking tape) $10USB to RS232 converter - $102nd hand compaq SFF PC - also free - 2.8Ghz P4 + 1.2G Ram + 32G SSD + Win10 32bitPOC was a success, I can remotely (from work...shhh) connect to this PC, see the image and manipulate the camera (awesome optics on these)... now to make it a little less dodgy(also in shot, 2 lamp test rig (buried), mini master cyl rod, random cloths, helping hands, ...etc)cheers,

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 17, 2016, 08:08:10 am
content: Quote from: VulcanBB18 on October 17, 2016, 08:00:19 amBloody hell....You win bodge of the universe for that, I submit to thee.

author: CJay
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 17, 2016, 12:25:38 pm
content: Quote from: 2N3055 on October 17, 2016, 07:27:13 amHa, not me, I used Token Ring *feels even older*

author: setq
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 17, 2016, 12:37:54 pm
content: More cable bodge. An RF power meter (indicator as it's not that accurate) for scope.Had this for about 3 years and it works fine up to ~10MHz. There's a Ge diode and a big 51 ohm resistor and a capacitor under the tape and heatshrink. Gets a little toasty and smells funny after a bit due to the melting glue but it just keeps going on:

author: lemming
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: October 17, 2016, 01:10:05 pm
content: Local theater was doing a dark comedy about bureaucracy in purgatory and wanted a 9' diameter clock with hands that spun very slowly in opposite directions.That's two 24v paper lift gearmotors out of a photocopier driving a set of concentric shafts made out of a piece of 40mm pvc pipe and a piece of threaded rod. The larger of the two pulleys was made by lathing a groove into a piece of plywood and then taking a belt, cutting it apart and gluing it on inside out. The whole thing was run off a DSE variable voltage power supply at 1.5VIt worked flawlessly for the entire 3 week run.Edit: Oh and all the sheet metal comes from cutting up the housing of a CD-Rom drive. I built the whole thing in about 3 hours.

author: m98
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 17, 2016, 03:18:37 pm
content: Used an Arduino with a crude voltage divider made out of some values I had lying around as a USB to Serial adapter for a quite expensive prototype board. Saved the day and worked just fine.Needed a small Li-Ion cell the same day, just bought a 5$ music player and took his battery out, which was luckily quite a similar size I needed.The power jacket of my netbook finally broke after a few years of use, just botched in two wires with a bent 2.45mm header as the socket. Works fine since now over half a year.Also, I've once successfully replaced the GPU of a Macbook using only my regular hot air station. I've never before soldered a BGA package remotely that big.

author: station240
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: October 17, 2016, 03:50:35 pm
content: Got given a dead 8 port network switch from work, the lightning strike the night before had vapourised 11kV cabling in the next street.Found it was OK looking inside, some bluetack and wires were used to apply power from spare ATX supply.Fixed it properly using:solid core wire and solder - free from phone company cross connection box up the road (they drop stuff on the ground)Soldering iron as mine was interstate - $10 from electronics storemolex power connector from old CDROM drive - free from the ancient PC the past tenant left me as a giftRepair consisted of:solder long wires to molex plugremove power input jacksolder the power wires to obvious 5V rail capacitorsolder solid core wire to bridge 2 electros on the logic part of the boardstrangely it had two separate 5V rails, hence the bridging wires.Still got it here, only recent change was to fit a new jack, as I finally found a spare 5V regulated supply.

author: babysitter
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 17, 2016, 05:19:31 pm
content: PCB with a thermistor which should press fit to the hot part, holes and removed groundplane to reduce thermal "migration" away from thermistor. Mechanics guy tried to read position from eagle file, selected wrong edge as reference due to top/bottom mixup, thermistor several mm away from target. Aaah!Thermistor now soldered to the hot part with two enameled cooper wire going to the board, faster response to temperature change, yay!

author: 2N3055
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 17, 2016, 10:44:37 pm
content: Quote from: CJay on October 17, 2016, 12:25:38 pmCoax Ethernet, ArcNET and Token Ring... I actually found a handful of ArcNET terminators in a box... 93 Ohms.. They are BNC, threw them away so they don't sneak among 50 Ohms ones... I'm confused enough even without help...And yeah, ancient...

author: Howardlong
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 17, 2016, 11:18:34 pm
content: Quote from: 2N3055 on October 17, 2016, 10:44:37 pmToken ring with type 1 Duplo cabling? I mean, what were they thinking?

author: 2N3055
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 17, 2016, 11:39:34 pm
content: It's IBM.. They were allowed to do that stuff... And pump up the cost for special, patented, registered trademark cables,..Even screws for rack mounts were special

author: CJay
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 18, 2016, 12:59:04 pm
content: Quote from: Howardlong on October 17, 2016, 11:18:34 pmYes. That stuff with MAUs, IBM 8228s I think, that needed the 'port initialisation tool', thing is it was popular enough that there were licensed clones, Madge springs to mind.Damn I feel old.I remember ARCNet too as well as some weird IBM metropolitan area network stuff that had some impressive RF magic on a full length ISA card, wish i'd kept some of those old cards now.

author: Howardlong
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 18, 2016, 02:31:30 pm
content: Quote from: CJay on October 18, 2016, 12:59:04 pmThe biggest problem with Token Ring with was its unreliability, followed by performance. A single bad host could bring down the entire segment, and sometimes worse. Although moving from Type 1 cabling to STP improved things somewhat, it didn't stop one bad host beaconing the entire ring.Early in the 90s, our network guys in a large bank moved from MAUs to CAUs having drunk the IBM cool aid, on the basis that this would improve reliability, or so IBM said. The CAUs were so buggy that for many months the service was worse than with MAUs until the firmware was updated several times. Also remember that back in those days, as well as green screen 3270 terminals, people were moving over to PCs en masse, but the network stack, particularly on Windows 3.x, was absurdly flakey. OS/2 was slightly better.Trying to maintain a wiring closet with Type 1 was also not fun. The size of the plugs didn't help at all, you always risked pulling out more than you bargained for when re-patching. Moving to STP was better, but there was an interim period when we had baluns everywhere to perform the transition.I have my worst bad-day-at-work in my career on token ring. I took down an entire retail bank network including their ATM network in the late 90s one Friday lunchtime. I wasn't popular. I'd performed a planned and coordinated change to insert a network sniffer onto their LAN to analyse a timeout error for one application, but I'd forgotten that the sniffer I was using had a feature that wasn't compatible with managed multi-segment Token Ring networks [It'd been a couple of years since I'd worked on TR, and had forgotten that the sniffer flagged packets in their MAC address fields as they went round so it knew it'd already captured them - ugh].Although we all complain these days, looking back maybe it's not so bad after all.

author: Howardlong
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 18, 2016, 02:43:14 pm
content: Back to bodges, when I was a relative youngster in about 1990, I worked for one of the large PC manufacturers as an on-site integrator on a project to deploy PCs on the desk in all branches of a well known bank.One of the requirements was to disable the floppy drive for virus avoidance. The head office responded with sharp intakes of breath and general "too hard" attitude. I can't remember the exact details, but my fix comprised of a microswitch mounted next to the keyswitch (remember when PCs had those?) wired through the floppy's read data line so that service engineers could still access the floppies. Thus, in normal use, the read data from the floppy drive was disabled.This hack was worked into the roll out at the factory for the three or four thousand PCs that eventually found their way onto the desks of the local branches.

author: vinicius.jlantunes
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: February 01, 2017, 10:31:30 pm
content: Not technically a bodge maybe but still... not sure I should be proud or ashamedThe battery in the garage clicker goes dead. Wife starts yapping that she could not get out this morning and luckily a neighbor was aroundOptions:1) go buy new battery somewhere, maybe not find and endure another day of2) see the picture - stack a few LR44's, whack some aluminum foil to bridge the gaps and be done