r/righttorepair

Is it just me or is it getting impossible to actually fix the things we own? I spent my afternoon trying to repair a simple leak in my washing machine only to find out that the manufacturer used custom plastic clips instead of standard bolts.

Why does everyone just accept this? We are literally being priced out of self-sufficiency. It used to be that if something was loose, you just grabbed a wrench and tightened it. Now, you need a specialized computer interface or a certified technician just to open the casing. It’s a joke. We’re generating mountains of e-waste because companies want to squeeze an extra $50 out of us for a service call.

I looked for replacement parts online checking the usual spots like eBay, alibaba, and local parts warehouses and even when you find the part, the machines are designed to be unserviceable. And then we wonder why nothing changes. We keep buying from these brands that treat us like users instead of owners. I’m so sick of living in a disposable culture where basic mechanical knowledge is being rendered useless by design. We should be furious that we are losing the right to repair our own lives.

Hello everyone ever since Naked Labs/Prism Labs shutdown the cloud late 2023. I've kept an eye on Reddit posts hoping someone would have found a way to get the scanner/app working again. Over the last couple of weeks I figured I'd finally give it a go since we still had the mirror and scale. With some persistence and some help from Claude. I now have the mirror fully working again, 100% offline with measurements and the little 3d model on iOS.

I'm pretty much at feature parity from where the original app/ecosystem was. Little 3D model, side by side comparison with some upgrades with HealthKit integration. I'm proxying all the API/Service calls to a mock cloud running off of a MacBook Pro I use as a media server. I'm working on a blog post series that covers the process. Along with what you'd need to do to fully revive yours if you still have it as well. I also added a calibration cycle since I was getting some odd weight readings to the real app. 5 measurements plus your weight from a working scale and the values are pretty solid. The firmware had no mechanism exposed to recalibrate.

Link to Debug App for side loading: NakedLabs Mirror Debug App

edit: fixed formatting

https://preview.redd.it/p01rz5r0182h1.jpg?width=1260&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=316bc8956d4a233b96e61ccd1132e2eb79da9d3e

Debug App Screenshot:

Summary of my findings, plus a debug app you can clone and side load to test your mirror if you still have it:

The mirror is recoverable because:

• It runs Yocto Linux on an Intel mini-PC, not Android.
• The cloud was an orchestration layer + S3-credentials handout — not a compute layer. All CV runs on the mirror (SLAM, multi-camera registration, body-model fitting, body-fat estimator). Scan output gets zipped and uploaded as capture.zip.
• The HTTPS client uses the OS trust store. Inject a self-signed cert + redirect api.nakedfit.net in /etc/hosts and you control the conversation.

What you need to extract from the mirror:

1. Root shell. Local tty1 only (rear USB + Display ports). User root, empty password. SSH is locked down out of the box; plant your Mac's pubkey at /home/root/.ssh/authorized_keys after first login.
2. Cloud-API library: /usr/lib/libcloud_api_library.so. strings + objdump -d against this gives you the 9 endpoints the mirror calls, the naked-device-hash auth header format, and the exact JSON shapes each handler parses (look for web::json::value::at(string) call sequences).
3. Coordinator binary: /usr/bin/coordinator. State machine, error codes (INT_ERR_CLD_*), subprocess names for the CV pipeline.
4. Device hash file: /mnt/bootfs/tpm/key.priv. The mirror's identity. Empty string works against my mock — no enforcement.
5. /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt — back this up before injecting your CA.

How I mocked the cloud:

• ~850 lines of stdlib Python on a Mac mini on my LAN. Single-file HTTPS server, no dependencies.
• Self-signed cert with CN=api.nakedfit.net and SAN entries for *.s3.amazonaws.com and naked-scans-mock.s3.*.amazonaws.com.
• Add <LAN-host-IP> api.nakedfit.net to mirror's /etc/hosts, append your CA to its /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt.
• Endpoints to handle: GET /hardware/me, POST /hardware/me/status, POST /scans/{capture,capture/queue,reconstruction,complete,location,status}. Return JSON shapes match what the disassembly shows the parsers expect — needsOobe must be int not bool, scanCode lives nested inside capture, preCapture must be a nested object, etc.
• The S3 upload that follows the create-capture call uses credentials you returned in the response. Bucket name + region + scanCode are all yours. Your /etc/hosts covers the bucket hostname too.

iOS side:

• Debug app (NakedMirrorDebug) — 16-step BLE/HTTP runbook; behavioral truth against the live mirror. Tells you what each characteristic does and which writes are destructive. Public: github.com/Laszlo-Lazuer/nakedmirror-debug
• Real app (NakedMirror) — production SwiftUI client. Polls /inbox/scans on the mock cloud, unzips, persists to SwiftData, renders the PLY with SceneKit, writes HealthKit per scan. Private — reach out if you have a mirror to recover.
• Mock cloud (nakedfit-server/mock_cloud.py) — the LAN HTTPS server. Private for the same reason.

So my so got an a3 laminator from fellowes, the venus for the amount of €360. And it is fast.

Marketed as a professional machine, she a kindergarten teacher uses it to laminate about everything

So she is a heavy user, the machine asks to do a cleaning pass regularly, which she did.

After about 500-700 a4 pouches she was laminating something and the page was "swallowed" which mind you was impossible according to their marketing.

I started to smell it and pulled the cord out of it.

It falls under "user error", so i got the damm thing open.

Boy let me tell you, that thing will be e waste no matter what.

The rollers were dirty, despite the so called cleaning, this would not be a problem if:

The page was not picked up by a roller and ends up into the heating chamber.

Normally there is just a heating element that will never break.

But this thing is special, there are 2 heating tubes made from borosilicate glass, with a heating wire in it.

If it does not break in shipping it will break when in use.

if you want to change the tube, you have to cut it somewhere, and this you can only do at the heating element. Changing the length of it.

The tube is almost impossible to find, fellowes refuses to give any specifics about the type of glass and heating element or provide parts. They say it is dangerous to change them yourself.

You have to sent it to them and they will repair it. Which was not necessarily of the thing was designed properly. After the fact we found out it is a widespread problem with these machines.

After getting mad they said sent it to us, and they would see what they can do. Guess what they can provide a new one after you pay for a new one.

Parts should be available for everyone, and it should be possible to repair everything.

Not to throw away everything

hi hi! I have a 2017 MacBook Pro that is in great physical condition and working totally fine except for the logic board is dead. Apple says it is not worth it to fix and that I should buy a new one, which is frustrating. I am up for trying to replace the logic board on my own through ifixit - but it says it is level "difficult". I have never attempted to repair an apple product before. Is this too hard or do y'all think it is worth a try? Thanks!

There was a time when your phone actually felt like yours.

Not just because you paid for it — but because you could truly control it. Unlock the bootloader, flash custom ROMs, tune the radio, replace the kernel, port different operating systems, and keep the device alive long after the manufacturer moved on.

I lived this era. From modding analogue phones in the late 90s at Granville TAFE, to cooking ROMs on XDA Developers during the HTC HD2 and Windows Mobile days — those communities turned curious tinkerers into real engineers.

We weren’t doing it to break things.

We were doing it because we loved the devices and wanted them to be better.

Fast forward to today.

A customer recently brought me a modern gaming phone wanting “global firmware”. Fifteen years ago that would’ve been straightforward. Today it involves cloud permissions, region locks, anti-rollback, attestation, encrypted partitions, and carefully preserving calibration data just so the hardware still works.

We’ve gone from owners to licensed users.

Modern phones are more powerful and more “secure” than ever — but they’ve also become increasingly hostile to true ownership:

Locked bootloaders

Parts pairing

Cloud-tethered activation

Software that treats you like a threat for wanting to repair or modify your own device

Right to Repair can’t just be about physical screws and spare parts. It needs to include software freedom too — the ability to unlock, reinstall, repair, and extend the life of the hardware we legally own.

This isn’t just nostalgia. It affects e-waste, sustainability, digital rights, education, and our technological independence.

This is why I do what I do. I don’t see devices as sealed disposable boxes. I see systems — and good repair means understanding the whole system, not just swapping parts.

📱 Full story on the blog:

https://norgantechnology.com.au/we-used-to-own-our-phones/

Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Did you mod phones back in the XDA days? Do you feel like you still own your current phone, or just license it?

The Problem: Why we throw away fixable things

I recently had a Rs. 200 (Indian currency) pair of earphones. The sound was good, until the fine wire in the right speaker's diaphragm coil broke. I knew exactly what was needed: a soldering job. But I didn't have a soldering iron, flux, or magnifying glass.

I went to a repair shop. They refused. Why? Because the labor cost for a skilled technician is higher than the value of the earphone. The market forces me to throw it away and buy new.

This applies to everything: Remote control cars, drones, chargers, laptop adapters. A Rs. 10 capacitor fails, and we throw away a Rs. 500 device because professional repair costs too much relative to the item's value. We have the "Technicians" (mobile repair guys) and the "Materials" (spare parts exist online), but the economics don't work.

The Solution: The "Education Arbitrage" - Schools as Repair Hubs

We can solve this by moving the repair process into schools. Here is the model:

1. The Workforce: Students (Secondary Education Students aged 12 to 18). They have time, they need to learn science, value education, dexterity, and they are curious.
2. The Infrastructure: The school hires one skilled Technician (ITI grad/local expert) and sets up a lab with basic tools (soldering irons, multimeters).
3. The Supply: The school collects broken items (e-waste) from neighbors or buys them cheaply (e.g., buying a broken remote car for Rs. 150).
4. The "Customer": The student.
   • The student pays a small fee (e.g., Rs. 200) to the school.
   • In exchange, they get the broken item, the spare parts, and guidance from the technician to fix it themselves.
   • Once fixed, the student keeps the item (now worth Rs. 500).

• Why this Economics works: In a normal shop, the technician's salary must be covered by the repair fee. That makes it too expensive. In this model, the school pays the technician's salary as part of their educational budget/marketing budget. The technician is there to teach, not just fix. This removes the labor cost barrier.
• Solving the Cost Issue: The workforce cost is effectively zero because the students are "paying" with their time to learn.
• The "IKEA Effect": A student who fixes a broken remote car values it more than a new one because they built it. They will buy it back from the school for Rs. 200 just to keep it as a trophy of their skill.

Inculcation of Value Education & Scientific Temperament among students:

This model isn't just about saving money; it’s about character building.

1. Respect for Resources (Value Education): When a student spends 30 minutes diagnosing a fault, stripping a wire, and soldering a connection, they learn the hard work involved in creating a product. They stop seeing objects as disposable "magic boxes" and start seeing them as the result of human effort and finite resources. It teaches them to care for their belongings, not because of the price tag, but because they understand the effort required to build (and rebuild) them.
2. Igniting Curiosity (Scientific Temperament): Most kids think a phone or a remote control car works by magic. But when they open it up and see the motors, gears, and circuits, the "magic" disappears, and engineering takes its place. By repairing the things they use daily, they realize that technology is understandable, logical, and something they can manipulate. This shifts their mindset from being passive consumers to active innovators, euntreprenuers and future engineers.

The Benefits (The "Win-Win-Win"):

• For the Student (Value Education): They aren't just reading theory; they are building dexterity. When a kid fixes a remote car with their own hands, they don't treat it like garbage. They respect it. It builds scientific temperament and confidence ("I built this").
• For the School (Massive PR): Instead of a boring Science Fair with paper volcanoes, imagine an exhibition where parents bring broken drones and watch their kids diagnose them with a multimeter. It proves the school teaches real skills. It justifies the school fees.
• For the Ecosystem (Trust): If I buy a refurbished phone from a stranger, I worry it's broken. But if my family or neighbor's kid fixes a toy and gifts/sells it to me, I trust it because I know who built it. The social bond replaces the warranty. The school gets a massive PR and reputation boost as well. Instead of just "99% Marks," the school shows parents and their neighbours that the school's children are bringing dead appliances back to life. Real-world engineering.
• For Technicians: A steady job in a school environment rather than fighting for customers in a crowded market.
• For Environment: We stop filling landfills with fixable plastic.

Feasibility & The "Spare Parts" Gap There are thousands of YouTube channels showing how to fix these things, yet the average person can't do it because they lack the one tool or the one spare part. Schools have the infrastructure to bridge that gap. There is a business opportunity here for startups as well to supply "School Repair Kits"—standardized bundles of gears, capacitors, 3D print files and wires that schools can stock.

Some people may raise concerns about safety and structure. To clarify, this doesn’t need to be part of the formal curriculum.

Many schools already offer leisure-time activity classes like music, sports, robotics, or Arduino clubs. The “School Repair Lab” can function similarly — as an optional, supervised club environment.

Soldering and technical work would be done under close supervision of the technician, with low-voltage devices only. Participation would require parental consent, just like sports activities.

This wouldn’t need a rigid curriculum with preselected items. It could be pragmatic and resource-based — students bring broken electronics from home or the neighborhood, and the lab works with what’s available.

Given the sheer scale of electronic waste around us, supply won’t be the constraint. If anything, the challenge may become managing time and prioritizing projects.

The goal isn’t just repair — it’s exposure, confidence, and hands-on engineering in an informal, curiosity-driven setting.

This model turns "Trash" into "Treasure" by adding Education to the mix. It solves the e-waste problem not with charity, but by creating value for students, parents, and schools.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this economic model. Could this work in your city? Is there a reason (liability, logistics) why schools haven't done this yet?