Last week I was sitting in a waiting room when the news came across my phone that Ingenuity, the helicopter that NASA put on Mars three years ago, would fly no more. The news hit me hard, and I moaned when I saw the headline; my wife, sitting next to me, thought for sure that my utterance meant someone had died. While she wasn’t quite right, she wasn’t wrong either, at least in my mind.

As soon as I got back to my desk I wrote up a short article on the end of Ingenuity‘s tenure as the only off-Earth flying machine — we like to have our readers hear news like this from Hackaday first if at all possible. To my surprise, a fair number of the comments that the article generated seemed to decry the anthropomorphization of technology in general and Ingenuity in particular, with undue harshness directed at what some deemed the overly emotional response by some of the NASA/JPL team members.

Granted, some of the goodbyes in that video are a little cringe, but still, as someone who seems to easily and eagerly form attachments to technology, the disdain for an emotional response to the loss of Ingenuity perplexed me. That got me thinking about what role anthropomorphization might play in our relationship with technology, and see if there’s maybe a reason — or at least a plausible excuse — for my emotional response to the demise of a machine.

Part of the Crew

To be clear, when I use the term “anthropomorphism” here I’m not referring to making machines look like humans, but rather to our tendency to develop emotional attachments to machines, as well as to act as if they have some level of awareness of their users and their creators. There’s a name for this: “Tool anthropomorphism,” or the assignment of human-like characteristics to tools and machines, is an area of scholarly research. In commonplace terms, when you sweet-talk a dodgy lawnmower so that it’ll start on the next pull, or say goodnight to the project on your workbench before giving up on it for the evening, you’re engaging in tool anthropomorphism.

Tool anthropomorphism is nothing new; we’ve been assigning human characteristics to our machines for a long time, long enough that it makes me think there has to be some purpose to it. On the user side, I think anthropomorphism helps people relate to technology. An example of this might be when humans first started naming boats. Logically, there’s no reason to give an inanimate object like a boat a name. But for members of a species as social and as strongly tribal as we are, it must have been much easier for our ancestors to get into a primitive boat and sail off into a dangerous ocean knowing that the vessel had a name. It probably would have made the boat seem less of a stranger and more like a member of the village, imbuing it with a personality that they could relate to.

Beyond dispelling the “otherness” of a ship, naming it probably served another, more practical purpose. With a name — and possibly a face; many cultures did (and still do) adorn the prows of boats with facial features and eyes, to help the boat “see” where it’s taking them — it’s a lot more likely that the crew will take proper care of it. Even the simplest sailing vessels are technically complex systems, and getting to know their quirks and idiosyncrasies is crucial to survival. It also gives the crew someone to beseech when things are going wrong, to lavish praise upon when returning safely to shore, or to blame in the few minutes left to them when it really let them down.

Of course, none of this makes any difference to the boat, since it has no consciousness to perceive its own status or to consider the sailors’ entreaties one way or the other. So in purely rational terms, how the sailors think about their boat won’t make the slightest difference to whether it sinks or floats. But that’s not the point; it’s the sailors who are influenced by the anthropomorphization, not the vessel. It’s a brain hack, really; act like the ship is a person worthy of love and slavish devotion, and you’re more likely to do what it takes to keep her together and get you home. Break that faith, and things probably won’t go the way you want them to.

Even though there’s always been a lot of superstition surrounding the ancient mariners and their ships, and understandably so given the risky nature of their trade, the purpose that anthropomorphism served back then applies to the “user experience” of technology all through the ages. The classic example of this, particularly for Americans, is with our cars. We spend so much time in our cars, often while having intense experiences, that it’s hard not to anthropomorphize them. Some of us give them names, and some even claim to know their vehicle’s personality quirks and what they’ll do in certain situations. We’ll talk to it, ply it with loving words of encouragement when it acts up, and threaten it with the junkyard when it lets us down. I can’t count the number of times I’ve arrived safely at home after a long, dangerous drive in a blizzard or hurricane and taken the time to tenderly caress the dashboard of my truck and whisper a quiet word of thanks for deliverance.

Is any of that rational? Of course not. The truck isn’t listening. On the other hand, feeling connected to that inanimate machine, especially after going through a harrowing experience with it, is powerfully motivating to get to know everything about it, to see to its care and maintenance, and to make sure it’s in top shape for the next trip out. Anthropomorphizing a car — or a computer, a spacecraft, a house, or even a helicopter on another planet — serves the same purpose as naming a ship did all those ages ago. The technology may change, but it’s still the human brain that’s getting hacked by seeing human characteristics where none exist, and the result is the same: a better, more productive relationship with machines.

Back to the Drawing Board

The other place where I think our tendency to anthropomorphize technology pays dividends, and the one that probably concerns most Hackaday readers more directly, is in the creation of new technologies. As we all know, real innovation is generally a long, drawn-out process that starts with ideation and (hopefully) ends with something useful that never existed before. No matter whether it’s mechanical, electrical, software, or a combination of all three, most projects are long, often painful slogs with too many dead ends and failures to count. Seeing that process through to the end is a hard thing to do, but personalizing the project somehow seems to make it easier.

If we’re thinking in strictly rational terms on difficult projects, the tenth or eleventh “back to the drawing board” moment would probably compel us to cut our losses and abandon the project. Sometimes we do just that, but other times we’ll say something like, “I can’t do that, this project is my baby!” Is it really? Nope, it’s just a collection of parts sitting on your bench. But somewhere along the line, probably without even realizing it, you started thinking of it as your offspring, with hopes and aspirations for what it’ll be when it “grows up.” Giving your project the characteristics of a child and seeing it as utterly dependent on you for survival is often enough to get you over the creative hump and see the project through to the end. If you have any doubt about the power of anthropomorphizing machines, a quick look at The Soul of a New Machine will probably be enough to convince you otherwise; would a team of otherwise rational engineers work 90-hour weeks to bring a minicomputer to life if they didn’t at least partially think of it as a person?

I’m no psychologist, so I have no idea whether my ideas about the role of anthropomorphism of machines are even approximately correct. Then again, I’m not a credentialed engineer either, yet I still do a pretty decent job figuring things out by the seats of my pants. And something tells me that thinking of machines in more human, more personal terms serves a purpose both in how we manage the often painful process of creation, as well as how we relate to the technology that others create. And if that means being saddened by the demise of a machine on Mars, I’m OK with that.

There’s probably some axiom in professional journalism that says you shouldn’t give out free advertisement to your competitors — but since none of us have any formal training in this kind of thing and are just making it up as we go along — we’re more than happy to plug the brand-new MOSFET.net.

Created by the mysterious hacker [N-O-D-E], the site is exceptionally minimal, providing an experience not entirely unlike a feed reader. Each story has a main image, a few sentences that describe what it’s about, and the ever-important link to the original source. There’s even a color filter applied on the images so they aren’t jarring when compared to the site’s monochrome color scheme. (If that all sounds familiar, it’s because Hackaday came up with the idea 18 years ago. But it’s cool, we’re not salty or anything.)

In all seriousness, the site looks very well done and will no doubt be a great resource for the community. A particularly interesting feature is that entries expire automatically after 30 days. This speaks to the goal [N-O-D-E] has for MOSFET.net — it’s designed to show you relevant tech news, and literally nothing else. The focus and simplicity is beautiful.

Here’s wishing all the luck to [N-O-D-E] in this new venture. We know better than most that it can be a difficult and sometimes thankless job, but we wouldn’t still be doing it all these years if it wasn’t worth the effort. The tech world is always growing and there’s plenty of room for everyone. In fact, a recent peek at the analytics revealed that Hackaday got more views in 2022 than at any time in its history. As far as we’re concerned, the future looks bright for everyone.

Once upon a time, countries protected their domestic industries with tariffs on imports. This gave the home side a price advantage over companies operating overseas, but the practice has somewhat fallen out of fashion in the past few decades.

These days, governments are altogether more creative, using fancy export controls to protect their interests. To that end, the United States enacted an export restriction on high-powered computing devices. In response, Chinese designers are attempting to artificially slow their hardware to dodge these rules.

I Got New Rules, I Count ‘Em

The new export rules come as the US government grapples with the ascendance of China’s military, in both size and technological sophistication. The regulations restrict the export of advanced integrated circuits, but the regulations don’t stop there. The tooling, software, and other manufacturing equipment required to fabricate such hardware is also subject to the rules. The often-stated aim is to slow or halt the development of advanced military devices that could be used by the Chinese government or sold on to other countries. Alternatively, it could be painted as an attempt to safeguard the advantage of existing players in the semiconductor market.

Chips capable of an “aggregate bidirectional transfer rate over all inputs and outputs” exceeding 600 GB/s, not counting to volatile memory, may not be exported or re-exported to China, under the new rules. Advanced manufacturing tools used for electroplating, chemical vapor deposition, and other chip-production processes are similarly banned from export. Just to cover all bases, software packages for the design, manufacturing, or use of these chips or associated hardware is also subject to the sanctions. Companies can apply for a license to export such material to China, however, as with most such restrictions, there is a presumption that such licenses will be denied. Other restrictions apply to chips exceeding certain machine learning performance limits and powerful supercomputers.

Additionally, regarding exports of items not subject to the above restrictions, “US persons” must have a license if the items will be used in the “development” or “production” of ICs in China meeting certain criteria. This includes chips that use a non-planar architecture, or are made at a technology node of 14 nm or less, as well as NAND memory with 128 or more layers, and DRAM made at a node of 18 nm or less. The category of “US persons” is broad, too, including US citizens, permanent residents, and companies and legal entities established in the US, even when operating abroad.

Dodging the Issue

Chinese tech giant Alibaba and smaller startup Biren Technology have since found themselves struggling with the restrictions. Along with a variety of lesser-known Chinese chip firms, they’ve invested heavily in designing new chips for high-powered computing applications. These include new chips to rival GPUs from companies like Nvidia and AMD, along with processors for machine learning applications.

But Alibaba and Biren are fabless, outsourcing the actual production step. Many of these firms have their designs produced by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC), considered a world-leading silicon foundry.

Some of the latest designs from these companies are in contravention of the new export rules, in terms of data rates or other factors. While they’re slated for production in Taiwan, the US export regulations nonetheless have an effect. That’s due to the fact that the vast majority of semiconductor fabs around the world rely on US-made equipment and software. If foreign fabs started shipping such designs to China, they would quickly be cut off from US equipment and software necessary to the facility’s work. China is spinning up its own semiconductor production facilities, but they’re presently years or decades behind the cutting-edge and thus can’t produce such advanced designs.

Biren Technology is at risk of running over the limit with its BR100 GPU, which is intended for machine learning applications. Early statements quoted a figure of 640 GB/s, in excess of the stated limit. Since then, the company’s website has listed the card’s bandwith at various figures from 512 GB/s to 448 GB/s. According to some researchers, the company may be disabling parts of the BR100 chip to slide past the limit, while potentially allowing it to be re-enabled later.

Alibaba’s own efforts are facing similar troubles. The company has been working on advanced machine-learning chips for AI work at TSMC’s 5 nm technology node. Reportedly, the team is exploring reworking the designs to avoid issues with the regulations, but this is a costly exercise that would take many months and millions of dollars.

Engineers have complained that the rules aren’t clear cut, as there are various ways to calculate the bidirectional transfer rate. Regardless, many are already working to reduce processor speeds to skirt by the rules. The key is remaining low-key, according to one source speaking to Ars Technica. Some companies have had press materials out in public for chips with transfer rates in excess of the regulations, alerting authorities to monitor shipments of such parts. In cases where a chip’s capabilities aren’t yet widely known, though, engineers have more potential to work with the fab to find a redesign that could bypass the regulations.

Part of a Trend

It’s not the first time that US export regulations have tried to clip the wings of Chinese tech firms. Huawei’s semiconductor arm, HiSilicon, fell afoul of a previous set of export rules in 2019. Initial sanctions were placed on the company due to backdoors allgedly found in Huawei’s communications equipment. These rules cut off Huawei’s access to software and hardware from companies like Intel, Google, and Qualcomm. However, Huawei persevered with its own chips and apps, with Chinese buyers propping up the company’s sales as international business faltered. HiSilicon quickly became the number one supplier of smartphone chipsets in China.

From there, the US government went up the chain, making it illegal to supply HiSilicon with equipment for its semiconductor fabs. That was the death knell for the company’s flagship smartphone chipsets, and it was quickly overtaken by other companies in the market.

Access to the world’s best silicon fabs is key to building high-performance chips. Presently, the US holds the keys to those, thanks to a monopoly on the supply of cutting-edge manufacturing equipment and design software. China will persevere on spinning up its own capacity, in much the same way as it has pursued the production of its own jet engines and other technologies. However, in much the same way, that’s a long, slow road to walk, and a costly one to boot.

Banner image: “Silicon Wafer” by Enrique Jiménez

Researchers from MIT and Stanford are taking the ‘person’ in ‘personal assistant’ to mean something more literal with these robots that scurry around on the user’s clothing.

Project Kino — inspired by living jewelry — are robotic accessories that use magnetic gripping wheels on both sides of the clothing to move about. For now they fill a mostly aesthetic function, creating kinetic accents to one’s attire, but one day they might be able to provide more interactive functionality. They could act as a phone’s mic, adjust clothing to suit the weather, function as high-visibility wear for cyclists or joggers, as haptic feedback sensors for all manner of applications (haptic sonar bodysuit, anyone?), assemble into large displays, and even function as a third — or more! — hand are just the tip of the iceberg for these ‘bots.

Size and the 45 minute battery life are limiting factors at present — both addressable down the line — but a wireless charging station on the user’s person that the robots can top up at is an intermediate solution. In addition, the complex 3D mapping of the user’s person is a bit too much for the Rovables’ microprocessors, so they are only partially autonomous and limited in their movement for now. Still, a personal swarm of these assistant-accessories sounds like some seriously cool near-future tech.

[Thanks for the tip, Itay!]

Hackaday readers are a vast and varied bunch. Some of us would call ourselves engineers or are otherwise employed in some kind of technical role. Others may still be studying to gain the requisite qualifications and are perhaps wondering just how to complete that final leap into the realm of gainful employment. Well, this one’s for you.

What sort of job are you looking for?

You might be a straight, down the lines, petroleum engineering graduate who’s looking to land a job in the oil and gas industry. Conversely, you might be an arts student who’s picked up a few skills with electronics over the years and are keen to gain a position doing grand installation pieces for musuems or corporate clients.

There’s a broad spectrum of jobs out there that require high-level technical skills, and my first piece of advice is that you shouldn’t limit yourself. There are things you can do to keep your options open, even over a long career – these could pay dividends when you’re looking for a seachange.

Can You Do The Job?

One of the reasons people enter degree programs is that the piece of paper is, ideally, proof that you have a certain set of skills. You can show up to an interview looking for a chemical engineer and you can wave your paper around that says “Yes, I know how to do that!”

It’s a grand idea, but today the degrees you work so slavishly for are more about keeping your resume in the pile than anything else. Once you get to the interview, there are two main things you need to achieve. The first is to prove that you’re a decent human being who can get along with others and show up to work on a regular basis. This is common to all jobs. The second is to prove that you are capable of completing the work required and that you have the necessary skills to do so.

“How do I prove that? Surely that’s the whole point of the degree!” you might say.  The degree is great at proving you have passed a lot of exams on theory, but doesn’t prove your experience.  Alternatively, you can tell people you know how to analyse fluid flows and optimise assembly code until you’re blue in the face, but talk is cheap. You need to show people you can walk the walk.

The trick is to draw on your prior experiences to back up your story. If you tell me you can write HTML code and create a decent website, I might believe you or I might not. Backing that up with a certificate might help a little. However, if in the interview you can direct me to check out TarasAwesomeWebsite.com and I find a super-responsive, clean, well designed page and you can then walk me through the development process, then I am seeing first hand that you’ve got what it takes.

An Example

Once upon a time, I was a student studying Aerospace Engineering, and wasn’t paying too much attention to where life would take me after university. As my studies drew to a close, however, it was time to find some work experience to meet the graduation requirements. I’d worked a few jobs here and there in the retail sector, mostly stacking shelves and scanning tickets at the local stadium. Application after application went out and after months of applying, I had precisely zero interviews. In the end I had to beg the university to give me a summer project to fulfill the requirement and thankfully, I was able to graduate.

It was around about this time that I’d also become deeply involved in music. I didn’t want to graduate and head straight into a 40-hour-a-week desk job, and wanted to live the life of a musician for a year or two. But I was also keenly aware that a long sabbatical after my degree combined with minimal real world experience was not going to put my engineering career off to a strong start when my fledgling band inevitably sputtered and died. I needed some way of keeping my engineering skills fresh while I was spending my days writing depressing grunge songs.

My plan was simple. I would leverage my electronics skills and start a business designing and building guitar effects pedals on the side. I figured I’d learn more about electronics, as well as the skills necessary to produce a product in volume and bring it to market.

It was a bumpy road at first – I spent a great deal of time developing a digital effect pedal that never came to fruition, before falling back on a simple analog distortion pedal as my first product. I went into business, suffering all manner of problems with suppliers and fit and finish, eventually shipping product all over the world and completing two successful crowdfunding campaigns.

Two years out of university, I took stock of the situation. The band was falling apart, and I wasn’t making the sales I needed to live off my effects business. It was time to look for an engineering position.

At this point, my resume was starting to look thicker, and juicier. With my final year university project and running my own business to fill things out, suddenly I had a breadth of real-world engineering experience. The key thing to note here is that this wasn’t given to me, or something I got by luck. It didn’t require connections or knowing the right person to score an internship. All it took was investing some of the money from my night jobs to start a business. I did things incredibly slowly and almost never paid for express shipping, so my customers had to wait, but it meant that I scored all this experience for well under $2,000 invested. All it required was a steady income from my boring night job, and the dedication to grind away at design and marketing.

I now had a flashy website thanks to Squarespace, and an amazing prop to take to interviews – a distortion pedal of my own design. I also had a great story to go with it – research online, through to a garage build and a crowdfunding launch combined with all the intricacies of running a business suddenly made me come across as a lot more experienced than I was two years before.

After a small handful of interviews, I scored a job working for a major automaker as a graduate engineer and all of a sudden, I’d cleared that first job hurdle. I was a real, working, employed engineer.

This was all thanks to the experience I now had, that I created entirely by myself. So often, people are turned down for jobs because they simply “don’t have the experience”. I would implore anyone in this position to make the experience yourself. 

In Summary

Overall, it comes down to this. Employers use interviews to try and determine if you’re capable of getting the job done. If you can show them you’ve already done it before, or something very similar, then you’re well on your way to landing the position. Real proof is worth a thousand pieces of paper, and if you do build something cool, it’s always a nice touch to hand the interviewer something you bootstrapped and built with your own two hands. It speaks volumes about your abilities as both an engineer, and a self starter.

I hope some of you out there find this useful, and I’d love to hear your tips for both gaining a technical role, and for building a strong career!

We’d never seen an iconoscope before. And that’s reason enough to watch the quirky Japanese, first-person video of a retired broadcast engineer’s loving restoration. (Embedded below.)

Quick iconoscope primer. It was the first video camera tube, invented in the mid-20s, and used from the mid-30s to mid-40s. It worked by charging up a plate with an array of photo-sensitive capacitors, taking an exposure by allowing the capacitors to discharge according to the light hitting them, and then reading out the values with another electron scanning beam.

The video chronicles [Ozaki Yoshio]’s epic rebuild in what looks like the most amazingly well-equipped basement lab we’ve ever seen. As mentioned above, it’s quirky: the iconoscope tube itself is doing the narrating, and “my father” is [Ozaki-san], and “my brother” is another tube — that [Ozaki] found wrapped up in paper in a hibachi grill! But you don’t even have to speak Japanese to enjoy the frame build and calibration of what is probably the only working iconoscope camera in existence. You’re literally watching an old master at work, and it shows.

You could argue that the iconoscope is the precursor to the CCD camera of today, which also uses capacitors to store the image. In that sense, it’s not so weird. But old TV tech is full of yet stranger devices. If you’d like to start down that rabbit hole, try the Nipkow Disk camera or the Eidophor projector.

Thanks [Ed], and friends, for the tip!

It’s been said that hackers are enamored with complex networks. In the 60s and 70s, the telephone network was the biggest around, singing a siren song to an entire generation of blue-boxing phone phreaks. I started a bit closer to the house. As a child I was fascinated by the heating system in the basement of our home: a network of pipes with a giant boiler in the middle. It knew when to come on to provide heat, and when to kick on for hot water. I spent hours charting the piping and electrical inputs and outputs, trying to understand how everything worked. My parents still tell stories of how I would ask to inspect the neighbors heating systems. I even pestered the maintenance staff at my nursery school until they finally took me down to see the monstrous steam boiler which kept the building warm.

My family was sure I would grow up to be a Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) tech. As it turned out, electronics and embedded systems were my calling. They may not have been too far from the truth though, as these days I find myself designing systems for a major manufacturer of boiler controls and thermostats.

Recently a house hunt led me to do some HVAC research on the web. What I found is that HVAC techs have created a great community on the internet. Tradesmen and women from all over the world share stories, pictures, and videos on websites such as HVAC-Talk and HeatingHelp.

Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning is one of the mechanical trades. Being an HVAC service tech isn’t a glamorous position. However, if you wake up on a cold winter morning with no heat, he or she can be a life saver. For folks living in colder climates, this is often a literal statement. Carbon monoxide, freezing temperatures, and fire are just a few of the ways a malfunctioning heat plant can wipe out a family.

One of the most interesting jobs the HVAC service tech goes on is the service call. This is where they get to be the troubleshooter. It could be no heat on an oil-fired boiler in a home, or no cooling on a rooftop commercial air conditioner. Their task is to get the system running, and to do it safely. Some systems are beyond repair though. No tech wants to leave a family without heat, but if a system is creating a dangerous condition, such as leaking carbon monoxide into the home, there isn’t really a choice. For those that can be repaired, techs have come up with an amazing array of hacks to get systems up and running safely. The best way to find out about these tricks and hacks is to watch some techs at work.

Thanks to the wonders of technology, we can now do that without climbing up on a hot roof or crawling through a dusty basement. An excellent community of techs has formed on YouTube. Techs like [Steven Lavimoniere], [Halligan142], and [Stephen Rardon] pack their cameras along with their wrenches and torches so we can ride along on their calls.

It takes a special kind of tech to record and post videos of their work. Any mistake, unsafe practice, or “half fix” will be picked apart in the comments. YouTube commenters are relentless, so folks making videos are very good or very brave or both.

The channels also outline how different work can be. [Halligan142] does a lot of work on small commercial systems. He can often be found on rooftops working on gas-fired heating systems, and AC units. Definitely check out [Halligan142’s] series on machining, as well as building a proton pack for Ghostbusters cosplay.

[Stephen Rardon] does a mix of residential and commercial work in North Carolina. Many of his days consist of servicing heat pump systems. Steven also shows off many of the newer tools available to the industry. Rather than the old gauge sets to measure refrigerant pressure, he uses a system called iManifold. Bluetooth sensors attach to the refrigerant lines as well as the air feed and return. The entire system’s performance can then be viewed on an Android or iOS phone or tablet.

[Steven Lavimoniere] hails from North Dartmouth, Massachusetts. His geographical area uses a lot of oil-fired hot water heating systems. That means he has to be a master plumber as well as an HVAC tech. His videos show how nasty oil service can be, especially on systems that haven’t been serviced in a few years. [Steven] also uses new electronic test equipment. His Testo combustion analyzer displays oil and gas system efficiency, and even allows him to print a permanent record of the results. This is a lot better than older systems like the Fyrite. The old systems determined CO2 and oxygen levels by measuring the volume change in a liquid which absorbs each gas. Efficiency calculations are then performed with a slide rule based upon the change in liquid volume and exhaust temperature. The liquids were composed of some nasty chemicals such as mercury chloride (HgCl2) and chromium (III) chloride hexahydrate, which I’m sure techs like [Steven] don’t miss.

You have to love Steven’s accent too. I was brought up watching episodes of This Old House, so the Bostonian accent is a perfect pairing with working on old homes and their systems.

The commenters watching these channels are more like hawks than your run-of-the-mill YouTube trolls. Many of them are HVAC techs themselves. These folks are often speaking with the voice of experience. Just as electrical engineers have to deal with bad hardware design, or software engineers deal with tangled legacy code, HVAC techs often have to cope with poorly installed systems, bad service, and years of neglect on heating and cooling systems. Techs have come up with their own vocabulary for the types of problems they run into. The “Run Cap Bandit” is someone who throws a new start/run capacitor on a system with a failing compressor.

HVAC-talk, a popular website for techs, has an entire section dedicated to photos of the types of issues field techs run into appropriately called The Wall of Shame. Inside you’ll find scenes like this one – a water heater with an exhaust made of PVC waste pipe. It’s never a good idea to vent 300+ degree F gas through plastic.

One question that often comes up is “can I work on my own heating or cooling system?” Here at Hackaday we are all about doing it yourself – but there are limits to what even we will try. While writing this article I took an informal poll of the writing and editing staff. Many of us have made repairs to our own systems – such as brazing joints on an evaporator coil, or replacing a thermocouple on a gas system. I myself have repaired broken pipes on my hydronic system, and have changed simple things like a clogged oil filter.

For major repairs though, it’s always best to call in a pro, especially for oil and gas systems. Yes, even oil burners can do nasty things like explode when mistreated. (They’re not kidding when they say don’t press that red button more than twice!) Professionals have the tools and the experience to ensure the system is running safe, clean, and minimize problems in the future. It’s money well spent, and you might even be able to take a look over their shoulder and learn a trick our two.