Airport Express Power Supply Repair

I bought an Apple Airport Express off Craigslist a couple months ago so I can send music to my living room stereo via Airtunes. The little bugger quit working about a month in though, so I tossed it in a drawer to be put on Ebay for scrap or otherwise dealt with. As is wont to happen this semester, however, one day recently I got bored and went hunting around my room for things to do. I ran across the Airport Express and started wondering what was wrong with it. Here’s the story of the teardown and my attempts at repairing it:

iPod 4th Gen Teardown

The series continues… My roommate had a 4th Gen iPod that someone had given him which wouldn’t turn on, so he gave it to me. My inner five-year-old was screaming for me to see its insides, so I cracked it open. Here are the results:

Canon Powershot SX100IS Teardown

I keep running across more and more stuff that is just begging to be torn apart. It’s like I’m 5 years old all over again, except this time I have screwdrivers instead of just rocks and sticks. Anyway, this time around, I tore down my roommate’s Canon Powershot SX100IS camera. It’s been having some issues with a stuck shutter, so we tried to pull it apart and fix it. Following are the results of that attempt:

Samsung SGH-E105 Phone teardown – pictures!

So, in the vein of tearing stuff apart, I ran across some pics I took a while back of my old SGH-E105 phone. I’m really hard on my phones, so the case was destroyed after about two years of use. After sourcing a new case off Ebay, I completely disassembled the phone to put the pieces in the new case. Pics of the torn apart phone after the break…

The Phone

HP Scanjet 4470 Teardown with Pictures

I’m in the process of cleaning out my room in preparation for my move to California at the end of this semester, so I decided to dig into my box of old electronic crap that I’ve been hauling around for a few years. In doing so, I ran across my trusty old Hewlett Packard Scanjet 4470 scanner that I’ve had since middle school. It hasn’t worked for a couple of years due to a bum power supply, but I managed to scrounge up another 12 volt supply and turn it on. It turns out that all these years of hauling it around have caught up with it, and it doesn’t scan very well anymore. I tried several scans with it, and they all came out with rainbow lines across them:

Scan of an IEEE publication I had laying around

After reading a few forum posts, I came to the conclusion that the CFL tube used to front-light the media being scanned is on the fritz. Couple this with the fact that HP doesn’t have any drivers that will work with Leopard, and I decided it was time to retire the old scanner to the dumpster. Being a EE, I couldn’t resist tearing it apart first to see its guts, so I thought I’d share the results of that with you, and thus begins…