Fixing Wanhao Duplicator 4S MightyBoard

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Recently I bough a faulty Wanhao Duplicator 4S to increase the capacity of my 3D printing requirements as I already own one and know the machine inside out. eBay seller’s description wrote that the 3D printer stalled in the middle of a print. I did some digging across the internet before I purchased the machine and was suspecting that some wires were not shielded correctly which resulted in electromagnetic interference. It cost me £300 and that’s half of the retail price so even if I couldn’t be able to fix it, I would have plenty of spare parts for my current 3D printer.

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Fixing a Seagate 7200.11 hard drive with Arduino

I received a Seagate 7200.11 hard disk in a BSY (busy) state. The hard disk drive spins, but it’s completely invisible to the BIOS. Apparently all these models are affected by a bug in the drive’s firmware: ST31000340AS, ST3500320AS, ST3750330AS and others too.

I found this very well written guide on how to fix the BSY state on Seagate 7200.11 drive. I needed some sort of serial TTL adapter to hook up to the drive’s serial port, but didn’t have one at hand. Then I remembered that I have an Arduino clone Freeduino lying around and I knew that it already has a FTDI chip that does the USB to serial conversion for the Atmega chip. Ok, so it’s not technically Arduino AVR chip used to fix the drive, just the board.

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