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Episode: 2750
Title: HPR2750: Windmill is on the Fritz
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2750/hpr2750.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 16:19:13
---
This is HPR Episode 2750 entitled Windmill in Underfritz and is part of the series of
electronic.
It is hosted by Ken Fallon and in about 5 minutes long and Karina Cleanflag.
The summary is using Fritzing to help reverse engineer a circuit in a winter model village Windmill.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
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Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallon and you're listening to another episode of Hacker
Public Radio.
Today I want to tell you about troubleshooting a model village Windmill that stopped working.
We have a Christmas.
One of the original ones was a Windmill that went to Blade of Water and it's a Christmas
thing.
Anyway, this year it stopped working all of a sudden and which is an external power supply
and a battery supply so I was kind of dreading taking it apart because I've tried to fix
a few of these things before and they are built.
They're built to a price I think is the word we're trying to say here.
There's no standardization, cables, power might be, you know, positive might be white, red,
blue, green, even switching colors from one LED to the next so you can trust nothing
in there.
An absolute mess of wires all soldered down onto a little.
What they had reused was a male USB header which has got a large earth and then four
different pads and they had drilled into that and put some diodes and all sorts but it's
a mess trying to figure out where things are going cause.
So you have a motor up at the top that turns the windmill around then you've got the LED
lights on the blades and those two come down as red and black which is fine and then there
are some LEDs hot glued around and that's another thing they love hot glue.
These things are just made with hot glue and then dangling wires.
So these wires coming down then all join together on shielded just a white wire turns into
a yellow wire that is insulated and goes to this little circuit board.
It is the weirdest, I have no idea why they did it like that but only trying to trace
it out I was trying to basically reverse engineers very difficult because all the wires
are not in to each other and everything so what I tried to do was do another piece of
paper and that didn't work, didn't have enough space and things moved around so I remembered
a two called Fritzing which is a F-R-I-T-Z-I-N-G or F-R-I-T-Z and it is a Fritzing.org and it's
kind of cool because you can put stuff on a breadboard, design stuff on a breadboard
and then you get the schematic and then you get a PCB of the thing that you're doing and
you can drag and drop in components and basically so I found this actually extremely useful
for debugging this because you could put in a battery symbol thing and then connect the
wires up to a resistor that over to the thing and as I was doing that I could disassemble
the various different parts and label them and eventually figured out what the circuit
diagram was actually quite cool it's not bad it's got a diode pretty reverse so if the power
supply is positive then that's cheap but cool so in the process of doing that I was able
to strip everything out so that break LED lights and the blades of the windmills were
working the tower were working they were and then the motor was as I did that as I connected
it sparked against the side of the battery so I'm deducing that that was broken and when I
connected up the power supply instead of reading 4.5 volts on it it actually read 7.5 so
don't know that might not have helped either so I promptly cut off the lead of that and chucked
it in the bit and I disconnected the motor as well from the whole thing because yeah it's in a
injection-wolded mount which is in the tough the whole thing with crack and break so right now
it is working on I reconnected everything up safely solder them and fixed some issues with this
that was their hot looped everything up and she's ready and by the time you hear this it'll
probably be back up so um tune in tomorrow for another example
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