It seems exemplary that in 2026 the options are a $300 brand name product, or a $40 product from seller "buyinau", and there is probably[*] no difference in the electrical engineering of the two.

[*] Probably is doing a lot of lifting here

Bonus cranky toot: these things cost $300 and have the same shitty shaded pole motor that you find in a $40 bargain basement fan heater!

It's probably only the thermal fuse that went in this motor (it was caked in dust), so I could disassemble the stator and try to change it. I could probably do this, but it is fiddly and then I have to trust my repair to sit out of sight and spin for thousands of hours...

Maybe one day we'll […]

I can't find anything about the OEM of the fan motor ("GRANS"). Clipsal discontinued this model 3 years ago and replaced with an identical-seeming one, so maybe the OEM went out of business.

There are a bunch of similarly dimensioned fans available from China, but: they may not exactly fit […]

@jandi @ifixcoinops Not at a very detailed level. The times I've seen it there's usually a lot of spam in dmesg output about stuck/slow operations, but when I've seen it it's usually on the verge of "computer no work at all" so I often haven't even been able to read dmesg output if it's also the […]

@ifixcoinops if the other disk is on its way out then a common failure symptom is the disk's controller suddenly goes unresponsive for a while - completely checks out.

Can block things which normally wouldn't incur any significant delay, and then the whole system cascade failures until […]

[Generic "AI" venting]

It's miserable how much work it takes now to tell the difference between receiving "high effort" and "low effort" communications.

(And I know it's hard if, for example, someone is writing in a language they don't know well - but I'll take someone's difficult-to-parse […]

@unlambda @voided Just wanted to pop back up and say thanks again for the SolveSpace recommendation. This week I designed a (relatively simple) thing with it and had a pleasant experience thus far!

(The fixing happened this morning, the weather station says it's 43C outside right now so no one is going outside if they can help it!)

While probing to trace out the schematic I realised one of the rectifier schottky diodes had shorted out (probably ESD from riding around with it disconnected from anything!)

So a pretty easy fix that didn't need any reversing, and I didn't finish reversing the existing circuit in the end.

It […]

Traced part of the schematic semi-correctly.

It's a little baroque: The light generates a constant voltage from the rectified dynamo output. Then there's an LED used as a light sensor (neat to see in a product), and it switches a sequence of small transistors […]

[Original post on aus.social]

Stripped it down and started tracing out the circuit. I was surprised at how complex it was, and characteristically Japanese with a "New Japan Radio Company" NJM2360 buck converter IC onboard.

@tj ah well, was a bit of a long shot. Looks like you got some good suggestions in other replies.

@tj Any different if you flip the USB-C plug over?

@stib Looks great! That corner castle joint is very satisfying, shame it'll have to be covered by a top rail (I read the other replies).