
Show HN: Take It Apart - tomkinstinch
https://www.takeitapart.com
======
tomkinstinch
If anyone is interested in the tech stack, it's based on Django under uWSGI,
and all of the services run within Docker containers. Pillow wasn't fast
enough for us to resize and crop images, so we have some faster custom code
there, and we run all images through jpegtran for lossless compression. [I
particularly like being able to crop all of the images within a guide on one
page, with an easy scroll between images.] Guide images are pushed to S3 by
Celery, and we're using MySQL as the database (though we will likely move to
PostgreSQL in the future). Logging is centralized by sending log messages to
rsyslog on each container via named pipes rather than log files (primarily so
we can use the community version of nginx). The container rsyslog instances
then redirect to a central rsyslog container and finally to loggly. We use
memcached.

We do dev on VMs, but the actual app runs on high-memory machines we picked up
from eBay that according to Dell phone support are second-hand Facebook
memcached boxes.

~~~
dalore
For images, we used to do it ourselves but then moved to hosted images
(cloudinary). Much better, and allows stateless web servers.

~~~
coldpie
The guide pages (e.g. [1]) are continually reloading for me. Maybe it's
refreshing once per image load, or something, but I don't have the patience to
wait. It did not reload continuously until I allowed JS on the page, which I
did because JS is required to load images. Something seems broken.

Firefox 29.0.1 on Linux.

[1]
[https://www.takeitapart.com/guide/72](https://www.takeitapart.com/guide/72)

~~~
tomkinstinch
Thanks for the report. It should definitely not be reloading continually, but
only on window resize to rescale the photo containers. We'll look into it.
I've disabled the functionality for anonymous users for now. It remains a
profile option for authenticated users.

Images are lazily loaded, but that should be triggering a rescale. We are
working to rethink the rescale functionality, so fixes and changes are coming
(after this weekend's Maker Faire).

------
Spittie
It's probably standard legalese, but I find it funny that in the TOS
([https://www.takeitapart.com/terms-of-use](https://www.takeitapart.com/terms-
of-use)) there is

    
    
        You acknowledge that (i) you own and are solely 
        responsible for the content that you submit, post, or 
        transmit
    

And

    
    
        You grant TakeItApart a non-exclusive, royalty-free, 
        transferable, sublicensable, worldwide license to use, 
        store, display, delete, reproduce, modify, create 
        derivative works from, perform, and distribute your 
        user content for the purposes of operating, developing, 
        providing, promoting, and using our Site. Nothing in 
        these Terms shall restrict our legal rights to user 
        content.
    

Pretty much a "we own the content you submit, but if this bother someone, it's
your fault and you'll face the aftermatch".

That said, it looks like a nice site, a crowdsourced iFixIt. Maybe the next
time I take something apart I'll remember to take some photos (I'd me more
willing to contribute if the TOS wasn't so restrictive, but since I still own
my content I don't mind so much").

~~~
tomkinstinch
One of the TakeItAparts here. We're certainly open to refining our Terms if
others have been down a similar path before and have advice. My personal
belief is to grant the user permissive rights, but we still need to worry
about liability. We're certainly open to revisions.

~~~
MaxGabriel
Could you use a Creative Commons licensing scheme like Stack Exchange?

~~~
tomkinstinch
It may be worthwhile for us to look into it, but everyone has their own
favorite creative commons license so we risk offending people if we choose
just one, and choosing multiple would likely complicate things for us in the
future. IANAL, but some CC licenses, like one prohibiting commercial use are
difficult to use/enforce since usage is difficult to define. Another issue is
that if a creator wishes to regain control of a work, CC makes it difficult
since the license is (as far as it was explained to me) perpetual over the
term of copyright protection.

We have plans to add guide forking and merging in the future, so the licensing
will need to allow derivative works. Our current license allows that while
trying to still be reasonably fair to content creators (in particular due to
the non-exclusivity). Since many car guides may begin by lifting the hood and
removing the dust cover, they should be able to all fork from the same
starting images, for example. There's also thumbnail generation, marketing
screenshots of pages with guide images, etc.

~~~
icebraining
So what if the original creator of a guide that has been forked and edited
multiple times decides to revoke the license? Wouldn't you have to delete all
forks and edits?

That's why FOSS and CC licenses are perpetual; to avoid building on
potentially shifting sands.

~~~
tomkinstinch
Great question. We'll be in touch with our lawyer.

------
patslat
"Welcome to TakeItApart.com False"

~~~
ultimatedelman
came here just to say this. looks like someone's binding is off?

------
smoyer
To quote a blog post I wrote in 2006 [1]:

"To be fair to my parents, they did supply a vast supply of love,
encouragement with my more sensible interests, pushed me in school (that was a
lot of work and would have been much easier if I'd understood my personality
type and learning style at the time) and provided an endless supply of items
that I could take apart in an effort to satisfy my curiousity of "How this
works" (they were especially happy when I became skilled enough to
successfully reassemble these items)."

Perhaps it would be a good idea to show how to reassemble the more expensive
items. Future parents would be grateful.

[1] - [http://codesnipers.com/?q=microivs-making-dreams-come-
true](http://codesnipers.com/?q=microivs-making-dreams-come-true)

~~~
sanswork
I still remember the first VCR I actually managed to get back together and
working in all its dark wood panelled glory. I moved onto software a few years
later to the excitement of my mother since I was a forgetful child with a lot
of burn marks on the floor where I'd forgotten or dropped a soldering iron.
Computer parts everywhere and a busy phone line were better than the risk of a
burnt down house.

------
mschuster91
Everytime I see electronics like
[https://www.takeitapart.com/guide/81](https://www.takeitapart.com/guide/81),
I feel like "shit, how incredibly precise have robots become".

Those resistors on the last image, attached to the 3.5mm jack, are 0.3mm wide
and 0.5mm high, and spaced together with next-to-zero distance. And yet, the
pick+place process was exact enough that the components didn't just melt
together.

Awesome.

~~~
agoetz
Most of the magic doesn't come from the robots, it comes from the soldermask.
Surface tension from molten solder will move misaligned parts by a surprising
amount:

[http://youtu.be/N_195d7bP9M?t=3m10s](http://youtu.be/N_195d7bP9M?t=3m10s)

~~~
k0
That solder mask is cool, but placing epoxy dots before placing the component
works pretty good, especially if a reflow oven is used anyways. Misaligned
components at high-tolerance has been an issue with solder masks, and not all
silicon based solder masks are CE-compliant. The time it takes to drop epoxy
dots is less than the time to retouch and realign the component.

I used to program PNP and CNC machines back in the heyday of Cray, then moved
up to developing the software to program PNPs and CNCs (shit, I've come a long
way since then but still miss the sweet smell of lead in the morning from the
wave solderers) improving "fiduciary" operations and increasing speed,
accuracy, and feeding.

------
nathanb
Why does it say "Welcome to TakeItApart.com False" on the banner? Is it false
that I am welcome? ;)

(I'm assuming it's a bug...consider this a bug report)

Very cool site. I've needed something like this for a while. I'll bookmark it,
and when I have more time I'll be glad to contribute information about
Logitech trackballs and some Asus Eee PCs which gave me disassembly trouble a
while back!

~~~
tomkinstinch
Ha, that's embarrassing. That boolean was a test statement that slipped
through; it's fixed now. :)

Having guides on trackballs and Eee PCs would be wonderful, and I'm sure they
would be helpful to others!

If you do submit guides, we'd also welcome feedback on the guide creation
process and any suggestions you may have to improve it.

------
washt
It would be cool if it had some sort of exchange for the individual parts
after tear down. For instance I have an old smart phone with a broken lcd, but
I'm sure the other parts are working. If I could use this site to document the
teardown and sell or trade the individual components afterward for something I
need on current project, that'd be epic.

~~~
tomkinstinch
That's a great idea. Fulfillment could be a problem, but maybe we could just
connect people who have parts with those who need them? The best we do
currently is create Octopart links for hover-over notes that are marked as
components.

~~~
janineyoong
Email us at contact at octopart.com! Let's see if we can do something even
better together.

------
kennywinker
Do none of the teardowns include text? Descriptions of how to do specific
steps are super useful if any of the steps are tricky or hard to show
visually.

~~~
tomkinstinch
I'm one or the TakeItAparts. I definitely agree that text descriptions are
essential. The site is just getting going and we wanted to have some content
on the site, but we haven't had a chance to fully annotate the guides. That
said, the guide creation process allows you to add Markdown text blocks to
each image (or video) as well as the guide itself, and images can be annotated
with hover-over photo notes. The photo notes themselves can optionally be
tagged as "components" (for part numbers), making salvageable or repairable
components easy to search for and enumerate.

------
6d0debc071
Secure connection: fatal error (1066)

[https://www.takeitapart.com/](https://www.takeitapart.com/)

Unable to verify the website's identity (OCSP error).

The response from the online certificate validation (OCSP) server was too old.

~~~
tomkinstinch
One of the TakeItAparts here. We've seen this in browsers where the OCSP
request fails (on the Comodo side), but the browser does not fall back to a
CRL check. What browser were you using when saw the error?

~~~
6d0debc071
Opera 12.16

~~~
tomkinstinch
It looks like this is a known problem with Opera 12.16[1][2]. According to the
linked thread, a workaround is to disable
opera:config#SecurityPrefs|OCSPValidateCertificates (obviously not ideal).

You might see if it is fixed in 12.17.

I do get an OCSP response if I run:

    
    
        openssl s_client -connect takeitapart.com:443 -tls1_2 -tlsextdebug -status
    

Qualys also shows OCSP is working (though seemingly not part of the A+
rating)[3].

1\. [http://forums.opera.com/discussion/1773932/broken-
websites-t...](http://forums.opera.com/discussion/1773932/broken-websites-
twitter-tumblr/p1)

2\.
[https://www.google.com/search?{google:acceptedSuggestion}oq=...](https://www.google.com/search?{google:acceptedSuggestion}oq=opera+12.16+The+response+from+the+online+certificate+validation+\(OCSP\)+server+was+too+old&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=opera+12.16+The+response+from+the+online+certificate+validation+\(OCSP\)+server+was+too+old)

3\.
[https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=takeitapart.c...](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=takeitapart.com)

~~~
6d0debc071
Ah, thank you for your time on this. :) I'm sorry to hear it's a browser end
problem.

------
warcode
I'd rather want putitbacktogether.com.

Disassembling something I can usually figure out easily, but putting it back
together is not that straight forward.

------
derwiki
I learned of a similar site yesterday,
[http://www.ifixit.com/](http://www.ifixit.com/)

~~~
washt
A computer repair shop I worked for used ifixit everyday. Big pictures,
warnings when you can easily break stuff( I severed many a flex cable when a
started), and clear instructions. The only setback is the range of devices
well documented. Once you get outside of mainstream devices, or something made
a year or two ago, the docs get skimpy.

------
dten
Why does it keep refreshing the page?!

0.7082894736842106 f39efb125de9.js:922 "scaled container width:
566.6315789473684"

~~~
tomkinstinch
OP here. If you saw that on a guide page, that's an experimental script we're
trying to rescale image containers to the viewport. A window resize would
trigger a refresh. It's not clear if we'll keep the behavior. If you make an
account, there is a profile option to turn it off (as well as the always-on
hover over notes).

~~~
cfqycwz
It would probably make sense to disable that effect on mobile--the constant
address bar disappearing and reappearing mobile browsers do triggers a lot of
refreshing. Maybe just listen for orientation-change events instead?

Very cool site otherwise, keep it up!

~~~
tomkinstinch
Great tip, thanks. It's been added to our To-Dos. We're reworking that
functionality in general so it may be a little while before the fix is
included, especially with all of us on deck for the Maker Faire this weekend.

------
Casseres
Hey Chris! I wonder if you remember me. I wrote the post on the Compaq
Presario R3000 back in 2006.

I'm glad to see you still have the website going and even got the .com for it.

~~~
tomkinstinch
Nice to be back in touch, here and out of band.

------
betadreamer
Very nice. I don't have to dig through youtube anymore to fix stuff. Good
choice on pictures vs videos btw. I don't have to trace back.

------
asadlionpk
As someone said, a crowdsourced version of iFixit. I will definitely keep this
bookmarked because I usually try to fix my phones, gadgets myself.

~~~
asptimothy
iFixit is all user-contributed / crowd-sourced.
[http://www.ifixit.com/Contribute](http://www.ifixit.com/Contribute)

------
userbinator
If you're interested in informational and entertaining videos of someone
taking things apart, check out the EEVblog teardown series:
[http://www.eevblog.com/episodes/](http://www.eevblog.com/episodes/)

Allowing video guides (linking to them, if you can't handle the bandwidth of
serving them locally) on your site would also be a good idea.

~~~
tomkinstinch
Dave Jones' video blog is fantastic. I love it.

We can handle a mixture of videos and images in our guides. Any video files
selected during guide creation are uploaded directly to a user's youtube
account via oauth, without leaving our site.

None on our team are great at video editing, so we haven't emphasized that
capability of the site. There are a few videos in this guide to give an idea
of how it _could_ work (as a potential alternative to singular lengthy
videos):

[https://www.takeitapart.com/guide/40](https://www.takeitapart.com/guide/40)

------
rasz_pl
Secure connection: fatal error (1066)

[https://www.takeitapart.com/](https://www.takeitapart.com/)

Unable to verify the website's identity (OCSP error).

The response from the online certificate validation (OCSP) server was too old.

~~~
tomkinstinch
Are you on Opera?

See:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7753129](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7753129)

------
sferoze
I love this website. I like the variety of products.

~~~
sferoze
It would be cool if you also had someone explain a little about the internals
of the product. I really enjoy watching these khan academy videos. Check them
out for an idea of what I am talking about:

[https://www.khanacademy.org/science/discoveries-
projects/Rev...](https://www.khanacademy.org/science/discoveries-
projects/Reverse-Eng)

~~~
tomkinstinch
We want to create a culture on the site that explains the engineering and
industrial design concepts behind the items on the site. How to inculcate that
imperative isn't clear, but we're starting with community outreach and then
hope to lead by example (the Roku guide is a step in that direction).

We were at the World Maker Faire in New York last fall, and we'll be at the
Bay Area Maker Faire in San Mateo this weekend [come visit us! :-) ]. At each
Maker Faire we brought a supply of e-waste items that faire goers could take
apart themselves. As they turned screws and pried access panels we explained
what components do, and some of the design decisions that went in to the
products. The reception was phenomenal, particularly among school kids (with a
roughly even breakdown of interest between the genders). We are also reaching
out to Makerspaces to spread awareness.

We're hoping that the site will evolve to provide a similar virtual experience
to the one Faire goers experienced at the Maker Faires. Essentially, we want
the site to show that it is okay to take things apart, whether to repair, to
salvage components, or to learn. The hope is that the guides on the site,
submitted by users, will allow anyone to "take something apart" without having
to pick up a screwdriver.

Creating a new guide is as easy as uploading a bulk selection of images, and
clicking "Continue" a few times. Basic image editing like rotation and
cropping can be done on the site, and it's easy to include image annotations
and tool lists.

~~~
sferoze
My quora question relates to this, please answer if you can:

[http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-books-or-classes-
abo...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-books-or-classes-about-
product-design-for-manufacturing?__snids__=444547391&__nsrc__=1)

