Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

The size of the screws are not the same.

In many cases I can easily see how they could've designed things such that far fewer sizes were necessary, but they don't. I do wonder if it's an early form of "anti-right-to-repair" obfuscation? For some reason, I've noticed this "design quirk" far more in various import products than domestic ones.

It's also interesting to read statements like this:

The DSP and control IC's in new Sony recorders e.g. MZ-R90/91 cannot be removed from the board due to a packaging design in which the pins are mounted under the chips and cannot be accessed for de-soldering. When these chips malfunction they are impossible to replace and the whole electronic board must be replaced at considerable expense.

...and then realise that, 23 years later, a sub-$50 hot air station can easily do that work (I'm assuming it's referring to BGA packages.)

View on HN

I remember working on board repair in the early 90s, then surface mount stuff started to pop in. Equipment at the time was literally $10k in today's dollars, at least that was the figure everyone talked about ($5k-ish).

I remember attaching a thin copper wire to my soldering iron, wrapping it around the tip and then out the front, and using that to work on those tiny pads. Sort of worked. Didn't even have solder tape, just a sucker.

I didn't even understand how a hot air station worked, until youtube showed me years later (I moved onto the software side). The things people could never find out, never know, never even knew existed pre-Internet are staggering.

I don't think anyone under 30 can even begin to comprehend how limited knowledge was before. Quite often, if you wanted to know something, you literally could not find any info about it at all. You wouldn't even know what to ask, when you approached a librarian, even if they could find some book they could get from an inter-library transfer -- which where I lived, took weeks!

Such a culture shift.

But anyhow, I can imagine I'd have destroyed the board trying to get all that back together, via my soldering-iron with wire on end workaround.

This sentiment mirrors precisely how I think we might look back at a pre- augmented reality era if we can get an ‘AR web’ right. I write about it and advocate for it on my blog - this post in particular has some exposition on how I think AR could obviate keyword foraging, not knowing what questions to ask, and many other kinds of ignorance we take for granted today:

https://noahnorman.substack.com/p/what-is-augmented-reality-...

yeah like.

people dont even understand. as a kid i would look at the content of .com files and .exe files in DOS and wonder why they didnt look like BASIC source code. wondering how the heck people made these wacky characters everywhere. had no idea what an assembler or a compiler was, and no way to find out.

as far as hardware.. .at least there was radio shack and those little books by Forrest Mims. Maybe a book at the book store. unlikely. the idea of board level repair to me would have been like aliens describing a spaceship without a translator.

Hahaha same here with the .com and .exe files. I had forgotten about that lol.

I'm so glad someone else had the experience! Just being that combination of bored and curious that makes you open everything with notepad until you find something cool, clicking through windows registry entries and changing stuff to see if it does anything, then having your mind blown when you find a hex editor for the first time because you read some text file that shows you how to edit a specific value to cheat in a game .... then you kinda boggle at how they knew which value to edit. Then it takes you another 5-10 years to figure that one out. I do think I could have learned faster if I had a guide, but also not having one helped in its own weird way.

yeah i think... things are better now. people are still pushing those boundaries by poking at the unknown, and learning by exploring. like those people porting Linux to the Apple M chips. they have so many more resources so their exploration nowdays takes them so much farther than it did us back in the day trying to flip a bit in copy protection binary

We're almost back. Search quality degradation has made finding even things you know exist significantly more difficult and time-consuming.

Screws usually end up different lengths and sizes for ordinary mechanical reasons (meaning, for example, if the screw was 0.5mm longer, it would interfere with something else).

The harder you are working to make the smallest thing possible, the more this happens.

Additionally, since no one has half a million 2.32mm long M1.2 screws just lying around, they're always a custom order. Might as well get the exact length you want.

In the iPhone, for example, each screw gets its own part number and each screw is custom.

Your assembly automation also affects screw choice. Some screw heads register better/faster than others depending on the size. This affects your line speed. A line might also be building sub-assemblies that are shipped to different lines with different equipment and this a whole different set of optimized part sizes.

The order you repair something isn't necessarily the order it was assembled in the factory(ies).

Yeah having worked for an electronics manufacturer they really really want to standardise this stuff where possible because every screw is a critical component and having many different types it means you can have many different chances to run out of stock and interrupt production. It also makes the manufacturing line more complex and training longer.

But in many cases there's just specific needs. Besides length, exterior screws are often countersunk, while internal ones would have flat heads to distribute the pressure over a PCB.

When it comes to stopping customers fiddling with the equipment look at Nintendo that use a different proprietary screw head for everything.

Who doesn't love how HDDs and optical drives use different screw sizes. Plus one is imperial and the other is metric. Maybe we should just feel lucky they standardized at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com