Teardown: Dashcam GPS antenna
Successful teardown reversals open the doors to subsequent dissections of location-sensing accessories.
Teardown: Wireless charger with a magnetic personality
Take a conventional Qi charger. Beef up its output (for compatible to-be-charged devices, at least). Add magnets. Now buy it and tear it apart. That, in a nutshell, is today's editorial piece.
Apple’s Beats Powerbeats Pro: A teardown
No fix? No problem. Let's instead proceed with the dissection and see what else is inside these dead-battery wireless earbuds.
Teardown: Amazon’s fourth-generation echo dot
Amazon claims that its latest-generation Echo Dot's sonic performance supersedes that of predecessors, and independent reviews concur. How'd the company accomplish this audio feat: an improved speaker, enclosure, conversion, processing, etc.?
Aukey dash cam teardown redux: DRA5 on spotlight
This intrepid analysis engineer revisits Aukey's dash cam product line, this time perusing a more diminutive offering.
Blow-by-blow repair attempt of Apple’s Beats Powerbeats Pro
A partnership with a local engineering company didn’t succeed in resurrecting a set of earbuds, but it still produced some interesting results, blazing the trail for a fuller teardown to be completed soon.
Inspecting an Insteon (and X10) controller
The Insteon powerline modem this engineer tore down back in July is only part of the implementation puzzle; an intelligent home automation controller is also necessary, and this one’s cloud independence came in handy recently.
Disarming a carbon monoxide detector
A quick perusal of the instruction sheet educated me that the CO alarm was the “end of life signal” operating state, and it would need to be replaced. The word “teardown” near-immediately popped into my still-groggy brain.
A look inside an HDD
Usually when a drive dies, this engineer just either apply a strong magnet or a heavy sledgehammer to it to render the information stored on it inaccessible to others, then toss it. But recent events gave him an inspection opportunity.
Investigating a Volvo key fob: A knowledgeable reader shares his insights
Intuition fueled by an engineering background in combination with online research is all well and good, but nothing beats the knowledge base of an actual product designer.