r/techsupportmacgyver

I have an old 3.5" HDD that I partially disassembled in order to be able to teach some kids at school, and in the meantime my girlfriend as well, how a hard drive actually works and how it looks on the inside, but i want to make it more realistic, and I want to make it spin. However, I don't want to carry with me a small PC or a PSU in order to plug into the wall just for this, I want to macgyver a battery for it. ChatGPT insists that it is a bad idea and that I shouldn't do it, and that's why I came here for advice. I was thinking of connecting a 9V battery to the 12V input, in the hopes that it would spin, just not as fast, or I was thinking of connecting multiple batteries in series, in order to gain 12V out of one 9V battery and 2 AAs, or out of 8 AAs, but i am not sure if it would work the way I expect it to work. Do you have any advice or ideas? Thanks.

Got tired of chinese replacement batteries for the Samsung S3 i747 (these work on i9300 too) last a few months then inflate.

Turns out if you 3d print a fake battery (og is 63mm x 50.2mm x 5.52mm with positive pin 1 being closest to corner, 3 being negative)

Using an old dead micro usb cable taking the end off & just plugging it in with red to positive & black to negative & use the fake battery as a holder/insert; you can turn it into a usb powered phone, just leave it plugged in, never charge or inflate it again

Before hiring a technician to fix anything, I occasionally try to see what I can figure out myself first. Most of the time they come, fix things quickly, and I’m left wondering, “what if I had just tried a bit more before calling?”

The freezer had been acting up, so I decided to give it a try. How hard could it really be? I started simple, unplugging it, plugging it back in, but it didn’t respond at all. So I went further and opened the back panel. That’s where things stopped feeling familiar.

Wires, pipes, the fan system… everything was arranged in a way that didn’t really make sense to my eyes. Nothing looked random, but it also wasn’t something you could just “guess” your way through. That was the moment I realized how interdependent the cooling and heat exchange system actually is.

I tried to understand it a bit better, not like an expert, just enough to calm the frustration. While reading around, I ended up on some supplier-type pages, the kind you don’t usually see when you’re just casually searching, more like breakdown listings where appliances stop being “a freezer” and turn into individual parts and components. I think I even saw similar breakdowns on places like Alibaba while scrolling, which made it even clearer how layered these systems really are.

In the end, I didn’t fix it myself. But I also couldn’t look at that freezer the same way again.