1202 ALARM

My brother-in-law dropped this broken Bosch cordless drill round a few weeks ago. After leaving it in quarantine for 72 hours I stripped it out for a look. After getting the 24-volt motor separated from the chuck it became obvious something was wrong because the motor wouldn't turn smoothly and was jamming. My first thought was that some debris had got inside the motor, but after prizing off the end the problem became clear, the two permanent magnets had come loose. I thought this was odd for an expensive drill with one of these legendary Bosch motors, but maybe it was a Friday afternoon one. A look online and on eBay wasn't promising, I could only find one possible replacement and it would cost €60 + shipping. The first attempt at glueing the magnets back in failed, but I hadn't mixed the epoxy properly so I'm giving it another go and this time I'll leave the thing for 72 hours as recommended to let the epoxy cure completely. I h...

In the autumn of 2018 the heater re-circulation motor (I'll refer to this as the HRM from now on) in my 2015 Skoda Rapid decided to fail. It had been making a grinding and clicking noise for a while and I had asked the local Skoda dealer to look into this during a routine service, which they didn't, but more on that later. The problem was that the motor failed in the re-circulate setting so the interior of the car steamed up very quickly and the windscreen couldn't be de-misted. Putting the air-conditioning on was a short-term solution up until the outside temperature dropped below 10 Celsius and that stopped working! There isn't a lot of information online about the Rapid because it is a less common model than other Skodas, but it shares a lot of design with the Fabia and Octavia so it wasn't too hard to get diagrams showing where the motor was and how it works. To get at the HRM I had to remove the glove box (7 Torx screws) and the heater motor (5 Torx screws), ...

Video Teddy Ruxpin hacked! He has a motor and potentiometer in his head which were wired to a servo control on his main board. After a bit of trial and error I was able to get the electronics from an old servo connected up so that he can be controlled directly by the Arduino (in this case a Nano) using the servo library. I'll have him talking soon!