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takeitapart.com

146 pointstomkinstinch59 comments

If anyone is interested in the tech stack, it's based on Django under uWSGI, and all of the services run within Docker containers. Pillow wasn't fast enough for us to resize and crop images, so we have some faster custom code there, and we run all images through jpegtran for lossless compression. [I particularly like being able to crop all of the images within a guide on one page, with an easy scroll between images.] Guide images are pushed to S3 by Celery, and we're using MySQL as the database (though we will likely move to PostgreSQL in the future). Logging is centralized by sending log messages to rsyslog on each container via named pipes rather than log files (primarily so we can use the community version of nginx). The container rsyslog instances then redirect to a central rsyslog container and finally to loggly. We use memcached.

We do dev on VMs, but the actual app runs on high-memory machines we picked up from eBay that according to Dell phone support are second-hand Facebook memcached boxes.

How cool :) Love hearing about sites running Docker in production. Please get in touch: nick@docker.com. We're always looking for people doing awesome stuff.

For images, we used to do it ourselves but then moved to hosted images (cloudinary). Much better, and allows stateless web servers.

The guide pages (e.g. [1]) are continually reloading for me. Maybe it's refreshing once per image load, or something, but I don't have the patience to wait. It did not reload continuously until I allowed JS on the page, which I did because JS is required to load images. Something seems broken.

Firefox 29.0.1 on Linux.

[1] https://www.takeitapart.com/guide/72

Thanks for the report. It should definitely not be reloading continually, but only on window resize to rescale the photo containers. We'll look into it. I've disabled the functionality for anonymous users for now. It remains a profile option for authenticated users.

Images are lazily loaded, but that should be triggering a rescale. We are working to rethink the rescale functionality, so fixes and changes are coming (after this weekend's Maker Faire).

It's probably standard legalese, but I find it funny that in the TOS (https://www.takeitapart.com/terms-of-use) there is

    You acknowledge that (i) you own and are solely 
    responsible for the content that you submit, post, or 
    transmit

And

    You grant TakeItApart a non-exclusive, royalty-free, 
    transferable, sublicensable, worldwide license to use, 
    store, display, delete, reproduce, modify, create 
    derivative works from, perform, and distribute your 
    user content for the purposes of operating, developing, 
    providing, promoting, and using our Site. Nothing in 
    these Terms shall restrict our legal rights to user 
    content.

Pretty much a "we own the content you submit, but if this bother someone, it's your fault and you'll face the aftermatch".

That said, it looks like a nice site, a crowdsourced iFixIt. Maybe the next time I take something apart I'll remember to take some photos (I'd me more willing to contribute if the TOS wasn't so restrictive, but since I still own my content I don't mind so much").

Not quite 'own' as the license is non-exclusive. Also interesting that the usual word 'perpetual' is missing.

This is so they can generate thumbnails of images.

Yes, seriously.

One of the TakeItAparts here. We're certainly open to refining our Terms if others have been down a similar path before and have advice. My personal belief is to grant the user permissive rights, but we still need to worry about liability. We're certainly open to revisions.

Could you use a Creative Commons licensing scheme like Stack Exchange?

It may be worthwhile for us to look into it, but everyone has their own favorite creative commons license so we risk offending people if we choose just one, and choosing multiple would likely complicate things for us in the future. IANAL, but some CC licenses, like one prohibiting commercial use are difficult to use/enforce since usage is difficult to define. Another issue is that if a creator wishes to regain control of a work, CC makes it difficult since the license is (as far as it was explained to me) perpetual over the term of copyright protection.

We have plans to add guide forking and merging in the future, so the licensing will need to allow derivative works. Our current license allows that while trying to still be reasonably fair to content creators (in particular due to the non-exclusivity). Since many car guides may begin by lifting the hood and removing the dust cover, they should be able to all fork from the same starting images, for example. There's also thumbnail generation, marketing screenshots of pages with guide images, etc.

So what if the original creator of a guide that has been forked and edited multiple times decides to revoke the license? Wouldn't you have to delete all forks and edits?

That's why FOSS and CC licenses are perpetual; to avoid building on potentially shifting sands.

Great question. We'll be in touch with our lawyer.

You might want to take a look at what Wikis do in terms of CC licensing.

Care to elaborate on specifics?

You should just adopt the license structure that wikipedia has. If it works for them, there's no reason it won't work for you.

This is a complete mis-characterization of the license.

1) It explicitly says "you own the content you submit."

2) It says you agree to let TakeItApart use the content you submit, in ways and purposes any website, forum, or blog would be expected and required to use content posted for general public display. This agreement does not limit you from posting the same content elsewhere (non-exclusive). Finally, you don't expect TakeItApart to pay you for this content (royalty-free).

3) Any expectation that a website should take unlimited legal liability for the content posted by the general public is unwarranted and unreasonable.

That's actually a _relatively_ new underpinning of online publishing law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicatio...

> That said, it looks like a nice site, a crowdsourced iFixIt.

We're already crowd-sourced! http://www.ifixit.com/Contribute Only about half our guides are staff-created.

> (I'd me more willing to contribute if the TOS wasn't so restrictive, but since I still own my content I don't mind so much"

Good news! Everything on iFixit is CC BY-NC-SA: http://www.ifixit.com/Info/Licensing (but you still own your content).

"Welcome to TakeItApart.com False"

came here just to say this. looks like someone's binding is off?

To quote a blog post I wrote in 2006 [1]:

"To be fair to my parents, they did supply a vast supply of love, encouragement with my more sensible interests, pushed me in school (that was a lot of work and would have been much easier if I'd understood my personality type and learning style at the time) and provided an endless supply of items that I could take apart in an effort to satisfy my curiousity of "How this works" (they were especially happy when I became skilled enough to successfully reassemble these items)."

Perhaps it would be a good idea to show how to reassemble the more expensive items. Future parents would be grateful.

[1] - http://codesnipers.com/?q=microivs-making-dreams-come-true

I still remember the first VCR I actually managed to get back together and working in all its dark wood panelled glory. I moved onto software a few years later to the excitement of my mother since I was a forgetful child with a lot of burn marks on the floor where I'd forgotten or dropped a soldering iron. Computer parts everywhere and a busy phone line were better than the risk of a burnt down house.

Holy cow. It was really 8 years ago, wasn't it? I remember being on BoS at the time and watching patio11's BCC experiment with interest and promising myself to get off my butt and start another business.

A bit off topic, but time sure does fly!

Everytime I see electronics like https://www.takeitapart.com/guide/81, I feel like "shit, how incredibly precise have robots become".

Those resistors on the last image, attached to the 3.5mm jack, are 0.3mm wide and 0.5mm high, and spaced together with next-to-zero distance. And yet, the pick+place process was exact enough that the components didn't just melt together.

Awesome.

Most of the magic doesn't come from the robots, it comes from the soldermask. Surface tension from molten solder will move misaligned parts by a surprising amount:

http://youtu.be/N_195d7bP9M?t=3m10s

That solder mask is cool, but placing epoxy dots before placing the component works pretty good, especially if a reflow oven is used anyways. Misaligned components at high-tolerance has been an issue with solder masks, and not all silicon based solder masks are CE-compliant. The time it takes to drop epoxy dots is less than the time to retouch and realign the component.

I used to program PNP and CNC machines back in the heyday of Cray, then moved up to developing the software to program PNPs and CNCs (shit, I've come a long way since then but still miss the sweet smell of lead in the morning from the wave solderers) improving "fiduciary" operations and increasing speed, accuracy, and feeding.

Why does it say "Welcome to TakeItApart.com False" on the banner? Is it false that I am welcome? ;)

(I'm assuming it's a bug...consider this a bug report)

Very cool site. I've needed something like this for a while. I'll bookmark it, and when I have more time I'll be glad to contribute information about Logitech trackballs and some Asus Eee PCs which gave me disassembly trouble a while back!

Ha, that's embarrassing. That boolean was a test statement that slipped through; it's fixed now. :)

Having guides on trackballs and Eee PCs would be wonderful, and I'm sure they would be helpful to others!

If you do submit guides, we'd also welcome feedback on the guide creation process and any suggestions you may have to improve it.

It would be cool if it had some sort of exchange for the individual parts after tear down. For instance I have an old smart phone with a broken lcd, but I'm sure the other parts are working. If I could use this site to document the teardown and sell or trade the individual components afterward for something I need on current project, that'd be epic.

That's a great idea. Fulfillment could be a problem, but maybe we could just connect people who have parts with those who need them? The best we do currently is create Octopart links for hover-over notes that are marked as components.

Email us at contact at octopart.com! Let's see if we can do something even better together.

Do none of the teardowns include text? Descriptions of how to do specific steps are super useful if any of the steps are tricky or hard to show visually.

I'm one or the TakeItAparts. I definitely agree that text descriptions are essential. The site is just getting going and we wanted to have some content on the site, but we haven't had a chance to fully annotate the guides. That said, the guide creation process allows you to add Markdown text blocks to each image (or video) as well as the guide itself, and images can be annotated with hover-over photo notes. The photo notes themselves can optionally be tagged as "components" (for part numbers), making salvageable or repairable components easy to search for and enumerate.

Secure connection: fatal error (1066)

https://www.takeitapart.com/

Unable to verify the website's identity (OCSP error).

The response from the online certificate validation (OCSP) server was too old.

One of the TakeItAparts here. We've seen this in browsers where the OCSP request fails (on the Comodo side), but the browser does not fall back to a CRL check. What browser were you using when saw the error?

Opera 12.16

It looks like this is a known problem with Opera 12.16[1][2]. According to the linked thread, a workaround is to disable opera:config#SecurityPrefs|OCSPValidateCertificates (obviously not ideal).

You might see if it is fixed in 12.17.

I do get an OCSP response if I run:

    openssl s_client -connect takeitapart.com:443 -tls1_2 -tlsextdebug -status

Qualys also shows OCSP is working (though seemingly not part of the A+ rating)[3].

1. http://forums.opera.com/discussion/1773932/broken-websites-t...

2. https://www.google.com/search?{google:acceptedSuggestion}oq=...

3. https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=takeitapart.c...

Ah, thank you for your time on this. :) I'm sorry to hear it's a browser end problem.

I'd rather want putitbacktogether.com.

Disassembling something I can usually figure out easily, but putting it back together is not that straight forward.

I learned of a similar site yesterday, http://www.ifixit.com/

A computer repair shop I worked for used ifixit everyday. Big pictures, warnings when you can easily break stuff( I severed many a flex cable when a started), and clear instructions. The only setback is the range of devices well documented. Once you get outside of mainstream devices, or something made a year or two ago, the docs get skimpy.

Why does it keep refreshing the page?!

0.7082894736842106 f39efb125de9.js:922 "scaled container width: 566.6315789473684"

OP here. If you saw that on a guide page, that's an experimental script we're trying to rescale image containers to the viewport. A window resize would trigger a refresh. It's not clear if we'll keep the behavior. If you make an account, there is a profile option to turn it off (as well as the always-on hover over notes).

It would probably make sense to disable that effect on mobile--the constant address bar disappearing and reappearing mobile browsers do triggers a lot of refreshing. Maybe just listen for orientation-change events instead?

Very cool site otherwise, keep it up!

Great tip, thanks. It's been added to our To-Dos. We're reworking that functionality in general so it may be a little while before the fix is included, especially with all of us on deck for the Maker Faire this weekend.

Hey Chris! I wonder if you remember me. I wrote the post on the Compaq Presario R3000 back in 2006.

I'm glad to see you still have the website going and even got the .com for it.

Nice to be back in touch, here and out of band.

Very nice. I don't have to dig through youtube anymore to fix stuff. Good choice on pictures vs videos btw. I don't have to trace back.

As someone said, a crowdsourced version of iFixit. I will definitely keep this bookmarked because I usually try to fix my phones, gadgets myself.

iFixit is all user-contributed / crowd-sourced. http://www.ifixit.com/Contribute

If you're interested in informational and entertaining videos of someone taking things apart, check out the EEVblog teardown series: http://www.eevblog.com/episodes/

Allowing video guides (linking to them, if you can't handle the bandwidth of serving them locally) on your site would also be a good idea.

Dave Jones' video blog is fantastic. I love it.

We can handle a mixture of videos and images in our guides. Any video files selected during guide creation are uploaded directly to a user's youtube account via oauth, without leaving our site.

None on our team are great at video editing, so we haven't emphasized that capability of the site. There are a few videos in this guide to give an idea of how it could work (as a potential alternative to singular lengthy videos):

https://www.takeitapart.com/guide/40

Secure connection: fatal error (1066)

https://www.takeitapart.com/

Unable to verify the website's identity (OCSP error).

The response from the online certificate validation (OCSP) server was too old.

Are you on Opera?

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7753129

I love this website. I like the variety of products.

It would be cool if you also had someone explain a little about the internals of the product. I really enjoy watching these khan academy videos. Check them out for an idea of what I am talking about:

https://www.khanacademy.org/science/discoveries-projects/Rev...

We want to create a culture on the site that explains the engineering and industrial design concepts behind the items on the site. How to inculcate that imperative isn't clear, but we're starting with community outreach and then hope to lead by example (the Roku guide is a step in that direction).

We were at the World Maker Faire in New York last fall, and we'll be at the Bay Area Maker Faire in San Mateo this weekend [come visit us! :-) ]. At each Maker Faire we brought a supply of e-waste items that faire goers could take apart themselves. As they turned screws and pried access panels we explained what components do, and some of the design decisions that went in to the products. The reception was phenomenal, particularly among school kids (with a roughly even breakdown of interest between the genders). We are also reaching out to Makerspaces to spread awareness.

We're hoping that the site will evolve to provide a similar virtual experience to the one Faire goers experienced at the Maker Faires. Essentially, we want the site to show that it is okay to take things apart, whether to repair, to salvage components, or to learn. The hope is that the guides on the site, submitted by users, will allow anyone to "take something apart" without having to pick up a screwdriver.

Creating a new guide is as easy as uploading a bulk selection of images, and clicking "Continue" a few times. Basic image editing like rotation and cropping can be done on the site, and it's easy to include image annotations and tool lists.

My quora question relates to this, please answer if you can:

http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-books-or-classes-abo...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com