Ask Lemmy

When I was in high school (like 2001 or so) I started doing electronics stuff, hobby projects, console mods, etc. simple stuff at first like installing mod chips and building rgb mods for older rf consoles but then building pic and embedded stuff which was somewhat impressive in the pre arduino days (even though it was functionally the same thing, just slightly more difficult because there wasn’t a dev board or ide)

That led to learning enough to fix stuff, which I did through college to earn some cash. I kept doing it, and kept doing it.

At one point I was actually earning quite a bit of money. The early smartphone days were great. Lasted a decent clip too. Each iphone generation I would buy a 50 pack of screens and batteries from chinese wholesalers that sold very good quality ones. Would easily burn through those. I didn’t really like doing this but it was lucrative. I simply charged less then anyone else in town and still made a decent amount per hour because it was ultimately stupid easy to do and all the repair shops (including apple) grossly overcharged. I would do it for $50 and the parts were like $17. Took me like 12 minutes. I was just doing it after work and making an extra 15k a year at the peak just off phones

Then the oled phones came out and all of a sudden parts were like $200, so that sucked, so that dropped drastically

Then the iphone xs came out and if you changed the parts the phone would give a nag screen saying “these parts may not be authentic” and disable features, even if I pulled the parts from another iphone. This also caused another drop although eventually I found programmers from china that could defeat it (for $$$ but at that point it was about the principle)

Then Samsung started doing it too (though they later walked it back, but then unwalked it back maybe? I don’t pay it much mind these days. For that matter apple also finally allows you to program new parts as of ios 18 but they have to be genuine apple parts that aren’t locked and buying them from apple is $$$$$. Plus last I checked they won’t even sell you parts unless you give them the device imei/serial so you can’t buy in bulk, get discounts, and doing what I did is completely impractical)

Then I gave up on that. I still do some of what I always did: buy broken stuff, fix it, sell it online. This is more fun to do because it’s interesting, like solving a puzzle, but less lucrative because it’s far more time consuming. I also no longer have to directly deal with customers which is nice (aside from the occasional person on ebay who wants a refund without returning the item because I didn’t make it clear the item was refurbished even though it was listed as refurbished, the description says it’s refurbished with a description of how it was refurbished, and an image saying “refurbished item” as the primary picture on the auction).

I also sometimes do hdmi and usb c replacements on consoles and phones because they don’t serialize those (yet, probably)

And every once in a while I still pursue an actual hobby project. My current one is making a proper portable Dreamcast but instead of doing it based on a raspberry pi or whatever I’m using the leaked schematics to rebuild the board with only the necessities in a much smaller footprint and trying to integrate some modern niceties (replace the disk drive with either sd card or cf, modern efficient power supply, built in VMU, etc). But it would sacrifice an actual Dreamcast and reuse the cpu, gpu, ram, Yamaha sound chip, etc so it wouldn’t emulate anything and be 100% accurate. About 80% to a prototype but progress is slow (been doing it for years) because I do have an actual job that takes up much of my time. Also I lost some enthusiasm because someone in china beat me to it years ago; you can buy it on AliExpress for like $500 if you really want one (but theirs is ugly and doesn’t have a lot of the feature set I plan. It does exist though, so it beats mine quite handily)