Repair on IamMrCupp

benchhud: Watching a Board Cook

mrcupp@mrcupp.com (Aaron Cupp) — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:00:00 -0700

The two-second look away

Here’s the workflow I was trying to kill.

Board’s drawing current it shouldn’t. You want to know which component is getting hot, so you pick up the thermal camera, point it at the board, look at its screen, find the bright spot, then look back at the microscope and try to work out which part that was. Two displays, two coordinate systems, and a mental transform between them that you redo every single time.

Three Services, One Privacy Boundary

mrcupp@mrcupp.com (Aaron Cupp) — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 20:00:00 -0700

When a feature decides your architecture

The bench runs three pieces of software I wrote: benchhud on the bench itself, bench-parts holding inventory, and benchhud-intake taking work in.

Three services for a one-person repair bench sounds like someone enjoying microservices a bit too much. It isn’t — or at least, it isn’t only that. The split is a privacy boundary, and one feature drew the line.

The feature

benchhud composites everything on the bench into one window and pushes that composite out as a virtual camera, so OBS can pick it up and I can stream a repair.

The Bench Is Open

mrcupp@mrcupp.com (Aaron Cupp) — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 01:15:00 -0700

Taking work

Short version: I do board-level repair, and I’m taking work. Here’s the page.

Longer version below, because I think the why matters more than the pitch.

Most repair isn’t repair

Take a laptop somewhere with a dead port and you’ll usually get a quote for a logic board. Not a component — the board. The diagnosis stops at “which module do we swap,” because that’s the model the industry is built around: replacement at the largest convenient unit, billed accordingly.

The Button That Did Nothing

mrcupp@mrcupp.com (Aaron Cupp) — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 18:00:00 -0700

A silence worth chasing

When you’re tracing a fault on a board, the two things you want side by side are the board and its schematic. OpenBoardView does the first half — open a .brd file, tap a part, see its pins and nets and neighbours. It’s the free replacement for the old Test_Link and Landrex tools, and it lives open next to my microscope.

Its best trick is cross-probing: click a designator on the board and the schematic PDF jumps to that part. Click a part in the schematic and it lights up on the board. Once you’ve worked that way, going back to scrolling a PDF by hand feels like doing arithmetic on paper.