Do any of you do repairs or any sort of modification on hardware? It's been a hobby/job of mine for a few years and I've had a lot of fun doing it, even just simple stuff like capacitor replacements.
Do you do any repairs on hardware frequently? Is there anything you're trying to fix?
I fear I'll break anything I try to fix, best thing I've done is customize a fighstick
I added S-Video to my model 1 Genesis, which sufficed until I got my Ikegami, and then I built breakout boxes for pretty much every console I own.
I think the best way to get over that fear is to start with very simple things, things which will teach you the concepts and properties of more advanced stuff. A simple thing to learn soldering would be things like replacing cartridge batteries. Once you learn the quirks of handling a soldering iron, lifting or even solder sucking, you can move on to more advanced repairs.
Personally I do a lot of console modding and pay careful attention to new techniques or ideas coming from that scene.
so you did some soldering
congratulations
go to an eletronic engineering school if you want to know what is hell on earth
I'll just stick to comparing values with a multimeter, I don't want to be considered an engineer, just to have useful and applicable knowledge
Oh, and I installed my own NESRGB board
which one did you get? I've been considering doing this for a friend but I'm not finding a wealth of information on an RGB board.
tempted to get a single board computer and make a media center with it but I don't know which one to get. Pi is the obvious choice but i seem to remember they were related to GG in some way, can't remember.
I also have an old laptop that probably need to come out of its case and become a sudo-desktop pc. bit of a wood fag so might try mounting it inside a hipster homemade case. but will probably just turn out like pic related
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I used Tim's board, with a standard PPU.
Do tell
it aint legos user
So you like maths?
Here have two scoops
@#13697706
I would never bother fixing stuff I can always just go ahead and buy something new instead. Why waste the time and effort when new is better?
Prepare to be bullied
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ah yes that's the one. glrobler grearters btfo again. did we ever find out if that was the Pi foundations official stance or just some intern running the twitter opinion?
Good goy. hope you got your free upgrade to windows 10!
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Go back to shitter
I remember finding source code online for a wii modchip. It ran on and old 12c508 pic chip.
Thats a 30 cent pic chip.
Was really easy to wire in because it just communicateddown the open serial port.
Remember those sine wave equation you solved in Calculus?
Now you can simulate it in RL!! with added explosion and electricity induced fire
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I did my keyboard but that's just soldering on switches
Don't forget about the "is the cap charged?" game
Do you like spending countless hours on studying and homework to only find you're an idiot because there is an easier way to do it, and you were doing it wrong to begin with? That's generally what it feels like, and when thousands of dollars are sucked from you each semester, it really hurts. And these past few weeks at my university have been rough for many of my peers and me. In summary, there have been several midterms in a short span of time, and it's about this time that professors also drop some of the hardest assignments of the semester, so good time management is pretty challenging. If you also have a job while doing this shit, it becomes exponentially more challenging because 20+ hours of working on school is now dedicated to work. But I swear it's all fun. I'm only losing my sanity and hair at a slow rate.
This is basically my life.
they never retracted anything they said so I feel it was indeed their official stance
Aren't there some competing boards that are basically compatible, but more powerful than the Pi anyway? Mine's damaged in a weird way so that it doesn't work on my PC monitor but is fine on a TV, so a replacement would be nice
How many hours of class do you americans have weekly? In my country classes last for between 30 and 40 hours each week. Getting any sort of job would put you well into 60 hour weeks in the very least.
Look up the asus i think its called Tinkerbox? They claim it can stream 4k and play older games at 60fps on it
The beaglebone is objectively better than the pi in every way.
Except the pi compute which is a really awesome concept (embed your SBC in a ram stick) but that has no good applications.
Yeah, those both look like good options.
Weren't they trying to sell the compute module for some kind of industrial applicatiions?
I only have a total of twelve credit hours this semester, which is three classes, but I typically spend an additional four to six hours each week for each class which totals anywhere from 40 to 70+ hours spent each week on school. I also work because I gotta eat once in a while and spend money on stupid shit like rent and school.
I don't have much free time anymore.
If you're on a tight budget you could get an Orange Pi, which is around 10 bucks cheaper than a raspberry (at least for me) and a bit more powerful.
Chipmodded my PS2 Slim.
Odroid > Rpi
I had seen it recommended over the pi here when GG was still relevant. I got more info from lakka.tv for setting up an emulation box for my tv.
My cucked redditor brother has an Rpi3 and it chokes on anything requiring more than Mario Kart 64. He had to overclock it, but now it runs fine mostly. Still some hiccups.
I have an Odroid C2 running Lakka and a C1+ running LibreELEC. Since C2 isn't listed in their chart, I'll say that it can handle N64 games at full speed that I can tell. C1+ can handle 1080p h264 and h265. Hi10p is fine. ASS subtitles are good. There are encodes it can't handle, but you're probably unlikely to run into them. If you want 4k or something, I'd look around on OpenELEC or LibreELEC forums to see what other people are using.
There are other boxes not supported by Lakka, so see what the media software you're going to run supports and compare those, also check the forums for unofficial ports if you want.
I just dropped the Lakka link because it had a good breakdown of some common ones and was helpful to me.
If you go with Odroid, do know that C1(+) and possibly even 2 may not play well with some micro SD cards. If you can't find a working card, it may be easier to just buy their eMMC module and a compatible micro SD to USB card reader. Had no issues booting from them, whereas SD was slow to boot or not at all. Not sure about their more powerful boards.
Have you tested MHFU for the PSP?
Buddy i feel you. This is me in my analysis and algebra classes on 3 hours of sleep and 50 hour work weeks. I just had to give up eventually because bills needed to get paid and fuck if you're going to learn reverse induction on no sleep. Before that fag pops in, algebra in higher math is number theory and related shit
My numbers seem off. I'm attributing that to my lack of sleep this week.
Yes, and from that perspective its pretty innovative.
You just add a ram slot footprint to your design and you only wire up the features you want to use.
you have to go back
I know that feel user. I've had 30-40 hours week of *classes* weekly. This does not include time spent on writing lab reports and studying tests. Oh yes, the tests. Spam of tests from every single subject every 5th week or so because why not? Having started 9th semester of this shit you eventually stop caring, but this is soul crushing.
I want to solder new mouse switches, mine are starting to double click. But it's not worth me getting a soldering gun and knowing me I'd fuck up.
MFW Americans and their guns
If you shoot your mouse with a gun its likely to function even worse.
But in all seriousness, if you whack your mouse buttons quite hard it can fix bounce issues but they will come back after some weeks.
You're joking right?
Seconding this question, if one wanted to do small time shit and just learn how to solder how do you even get into it?
On the first part yes.
On the second part no. It fixed my steelseries mouse and I was able to use it for about 5 months before it came back.
I've been opening up hardware since 5 or so, starting with Genesis controllers for cleaning and maintenance. Also opened the system itself to fix the power slider that was not moving properly one time.
Back then opening systems was easy, just a bunch of screws and pop goes the cover. Now things are considerable more annoying, and shit like Triwing and Pentalobe screws (goddamn, Apple) make it even more of a pain.
Smartphones? Better just give up, almost every phone is now glued together. My old 2009 android phone is dead easy to open, however. Replacing the screen takes a couple minutes at most.
Soldering is easy once you get the hang of it. Start with big components. When you start working with the smaller surface mount type components you'll want a fine tip iron and some good hand-eye coordination.
A 'third hand' (metallic tool that has clips for you to set items on) can be a godsend so you have both hands available for use.
Here's a quick comic style soldering guide: mightyohm.com
As someone who solders surface mount packages daily I always tell newbies to avoid a very fine soldering iron tip.
I do QFN and TSSOP packages with a big wedge tip.
With the proper technique and correct use of flux you can always do a better, quicker job with a pretty large tip.
I also recall Dave Elliot from EEVBLOG making similar comments about newbies using really small conical tips and wondering why things are so difficult. Its because you have shitty heat transfer.
I modded a couple consumer Trinitron CRTs to accept RGB video from the PC, it's pretty hard and complicated compared to buying something like an Arcade VGA and / or making some conversions to end with 240p through S - Video, but in the end it looks better and i saved the money.
I also made my own hitbox for fighting games, it looks really ugly btw since i made it with mdf as a kind of a prototype, but i don't think i'd be much better at doing it in acrylic so it stays like that.
I heard its a good idea to coat the tip of the soldering iron before actually soldering anything. Is it true?
Yeah it's called tinning. It helps the solder slide off and pool on the pad.
not the iron, but tin the pad you're heating up. It helps relieve whatever you might be removing. Also use liquid flux.
Yep I did some repairs on a 3ds, and a gamecubes, by "repairs" I mean opening and cleaning the dirty as fuck 3ds and fiddling with a multimeter and a potentiometer in the gamecubes, pretty easy stuff overall, never had to solder anything.
in relation to repairs, I just diagnosed 3 CRT monitors. I think I have two junk tubes, but one working one that appears to be stuck in a resetting loop. Going to inspect internally. 2 of the bad tubes which need rejuvenation are both hitting 65K hours. Fortunately, from 3 crap ones I can undoubtedly assemble one working set. Tube issues are such a pain, rejuvenation isn't permanent and in some cases can result in absolute failure by burning up the emitting surface of the cathode. I imagine these fine pitch AGs will just crap themselves out. May just resell for parts or something.
I think I have to send it out to someone who knows what they're doing. Shit, there's 100 capacitors ALONE inside this thing to replace before I even get to real repairs. who the fuck designed this thing.
makes me ill looking at it. Last console I cracked open for maintenance was a PS4, and whatever your criticisms are about the system itself, the actual design of the thing is just fantastic. I never had such a joy disassembling a console before.
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That is the future of all porn user. It was never meant to last forever.
THOSE FUCKING NINTENDO SCREWS, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU NINTENDO.
They don't want dirty gaijin meddling with their top tier electronics
No, its right there, i just have to find the cure ;_;
most of what I fix is nintendo shit, I think the only system of theirs I've seen without issues is the n64 - but that has a controller that destroys itself with regular use.
If you've ever opened an SNES, you know they really don't want you to repair the unit.
can't break something twice, if it's already not working
try formatting the new hard drive you got with the same file system, then swapping the controller board.
>>>/neogaf/
Fuck off, faggot.
I can't solder at all. I feel retarded knowing the best I can do, someone else can do it in like a second. I have no fucking clue as to how the hell do they do it.
Just buy some cheap DIY kits from Amazon and eBay and practice.
I have a really good soldering kit already. I'm just too retarded to solder properly.
If you just want a retro console, the OrangePi PC Plus is a great option. They're also cheap as fuck on Aliexpress. Look up "retrorangepi" con (((youtube))) if you're interested.
I was talking about stuff like this, build many of them, you'll get better at it.
Ah, those. Thanks for the tip, user, i'll see if there's anything interesting.
You forgot the case for the clock, user.
amazon.com
its easy. Put the iron on the pad. push the solder into the iron. Pull away the solder, slide the iron off.
*blocks your path*
Now what the fuck is that?
Pic 1 why and how would heat escape the rig? Seems like a house fire starter. Pic 4 is a little disturbing, but 3's waifu case seems like a nice idea. If it doesn't melt them that is.
lmao just weld another bolt to it and unscrew it
I prefer to have it expose with four big iro… lithium-ion batteries
You can generally repair microswitches on the spot as well, without desoldering them. If you can get the top off, remove the leaf and restore its bend, that'll fix it right up.
It is a fiddly process, though. The spring is very small and thin, so it's hard to replace and easy to make a sharp bend which may ruin it completely. Took me two attempts to get it to feel right. The first one fixed the double click, but it ended up too light compared to the other mouse button. Second one got them on par again.
I've replaced some jelly bean components in some other electronics. It's a decent enough skill to have, as sometimes capacitors and the likes give out.
Tri-wing. Seen them on Nintendo's systems.
Huh, never considered this option.
tri-wing
*buys a $8 screw driver set*
Just drill it out and replace the screws.
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What if I solder the screwdriver to it?
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You'd probably either ruin the screwdriver or break the connection. Either way, it's a stupid thing to do. Unless you meant soldering an loose screw to a screwdriver. In that case, go nuts.
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currently going for volunteer position, feelsgoodman
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I know the demand, it just seems pointless to waste your time working for free when you could be trying to get your foot in the door wherever you can.
Better for your resume because they don't put you in bottom tier shit jobs that you have to work up for a while to advance out of. They won't hire a new guy to do any pipe work which is where a lot of the higher paying jobs go to.
Come on, they're like $2 from China.
I have an EE degree. What have I been doing since I acquired it TEN YEARS AGO? Working for a fucking phone company, assisting retards who make in one month, what I make in a year. It's hell.
I have a solder tool, but the only thing I used it for is modding and repairing headphones. It's convenient to add a 3.5mm jack into a pair of headphones that would normally not have a detachable cable.
Depends on what is considered a repair. I like to open up controllers to clean them from time to time, and I recently took out the shoulder buttons on my DS and put them back in because the L-button wasn't working (it's working now), or the one time I replace the screen on a smartphone. I think my first time opening a console was when my Wii's drive was making weird grinding noises. I really regret not knowing anything about electronics, when I open up a device it's all just hieroglyphs to me. The only electronics-related thing I know to so re-attach wires (just did that a few days ago) because it's obvious where the problem lies.
save it while you can user. magnetic impressions don't last forever
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You need to put the old eeprom chip in the new pcb.
I try to fix my controllers and peripherals when I can. I also always buy cheap stuff so it's no big deal if I do seal the coffin when trying to fix it.
So that's why electrical engineers are either bald or prematurely aged. Got it.
t. be finishing the college meme in a couple semesters with a degree in IT & computer science minor
I've got 10 og xboxs lying around that I got from an opshop closing down. I want to do the memory upgrade and see if I can get virtua cop 3 working. Are there any retard proof guides for this?
Okay and how do you do it without a welder?
My best trick was to just get a drill and drill out the whole screw.
If the screw isn't recessed pliers work pretty well. Rotate them around to score the head for more grip if it's tricky, but it will work for most small screws.
Exactly why I fear opening my surround sound's amp. Has a pair of caps the size of fucking coke cans
Those aren't Nintendo Tri-Wings. Nintendo Tri-Wings are symmetrical.
Depending on the size of your object you can just use a screw extractor and not ruin the threading.
I heard upgrading the RAM causes more issues then it solves.
Oh god, I remember trying to fix my old Razer mouse. The flat part of the switch dislodged, and I didn't have tweezers so I tried MacGyvering it with a pin and some sticky tack. I spent like a day trying that, and it almost worked, but I ended up getting tweezers and spent another hour or so before I finally got it working again.
That Razer mouse lasted like 5 years before the laser on it finally died.
This. Pretty much all Seagates need this. Some Samsungs can be board-swapped with no soldering trickery involved.
I got right now FOUR terrible Seagate ST1000DM003. They fucking suck.
The logic boards in these drives are crap (they all get corroded easily), so first thing I tried was to swap the #1 board (good drive) with the #4 board. Swapped the EEPROM chips too. The result… Drive #1 still works perfectly and #4 does not. So at least I know the #4 board is fine.
Next step would be to either do a headswap or a platter swap. That'd be a first for me, but I do not have equipment for this kinda thing. At this point I just told the client to investigate for a clean room laboratory type service. I don't think there are any here, though.
the ol' tongue test eh
Usually a flathead screwdriver, jam it in real good and it will do just fine and then find a new screw.
T. Carpenter-son who don't have time to weld shit on top of shit.
So rather than go to /g/ and bear their autism I though I'd ask here:
I have a "Media PC" setup, which consists of a Dell Optiplex 990, i5, 8Gb RAM, 500Gb HDD and a nVidia GT710 card. I want to buy a nVidia GTX 1050Ti 4Gb Low Profile for $219AU.
Is this a feasable and affordable solution to playing some decent games cheaply, or is there a better solution you can suggest? I only play Stalker, Spintires, ARMA II, The Bureau, Robocraft etc. so I don't need anything too fancy.
I realize this may sound retarded but where exactly do you gain experience as a hobbyist on this stuff?
Just dismantle and try to fuck around with broken/cheap shit or is being a hobbyist difficult if you're not into it from an early age?
I've had to re-cap my mobo twice, and I'm honestly shocked it lasted that long.
Yes, it isn't hard and the "only kids can learn stuff quickly" meme is bullshit. I'd say it applies much more strongly to languages, music and the like than technical skills. Modifying and fixing electronics is easy as generally you're just replacing/fixing parts, so you already have the part, or can read the information off it, remove it, get a new one and solder it in. Designing circuits is harder as you have to calculate resistance/impedance and other values and make sure it's in line with the ratings on components, if you have ICs and the like you have to go through the documentation, etc. But fixing stuff is piss easy.
The difficult part is probably diagnosing faults that aren't obvious (an obvious fault would be a blown capacitor, the top bulges) in the case of stuff like appliances a multi-meter is all you really need. As you're mostly going to be looking for shorts and open circuits, so can find the problem by process of elimination. In the case of electronics, most of the time if the problem isn't obvious when looking at the circuit you're SOL. You can maybe check larger components with a continuity tester to see if something is blown but if some tiny part buried somewhere is the issue you're likely not going to find it.
Did so just now. I didn't fix the font not displaying, I don't play a lot of ppsspp, I guess it needs a fix? But it boots, FMV plays fine, and I ran around outside a bit without any problems. The Digimon World game does well too, so I assume it's fine.
I wouldnt be doing it for any issues, just to play virtua cop 3.
@
YOU HAVE TO GO BACK
What, to /g/? I'd rather kick the chair than put up with that shit…
I've done a few mods/fix :
S-video and stereo modded a genesis model 1, Waiting for my 10 mhz crystal to be shipped so I can overclock
S-video a sega master system (identical to the genesis, it uses the same chip)
Flashed a sega saturn action replay so I can play backups
disabled the lockout chip on my nes
tried to install a xeno chip on my gamecube. I failed in a very embarrassing manner. ended up ripping up the solder pads, thankfully the console still work
I tried to fix a PVM 14 inch with a cracked board… ended up not working, but it was a good learning experience.
I have a game gear that need new caps, 2 PC engine CD rom 2 that are fucked up (no, it's not the gear)
just google "gtx 1050ti benchmark" and figure it out on your own
I know the specs, the ASUS card has the best OC speed, but I was wondering if there was another low profile option anyone else knows about, like an AMD option or whatever…
If you can't solder a 31-pin molex blindfolded you ain't done shit son.
after amassing a supply of og xboxes, I took the super good disc drive out of my dead xbox and popped into one of my not-so-dead xboxes, and then I just kinda fucked around with transplating hard drives and disk drives to and from xboxes for a bit
Dave Jones
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I have a bunch of Xboxes stored for about a couple years now already. Got to fix some of the simplest cases but for the rest I needed EEPROM dumps, which now I got a cable for.
DVD drives can be swapped around Xboxes without any trickery (thankfully, as these Thomson drives die quickly) but the HDDs require adjusting the keys - either the one stored in EEPROM or the key in the HDD itself.
If the consoles still boot it's an easy task to get these keys with any custom dashboard worth its salt, but if it does not boot then that's time for the serial cable.
Write down the serial numbers for each console you have and dump their EEPROMS for future use. Or just write back the EEPROM with the password for each one to all zeros and set every HDD you use from now on to that password, whatever works.
Bumping this thread so more people can shit on this user.
It was a pretty standard screw in electronics. Mostly used for consumer shit transformers to make you think twice before opening one. Nowadays they just glue them shut, so you clueless DIY guys don't blow a fuse.
Electronic engineering is terrible. From a job perspective, It's overly complicated by restrictions made by PCB design, available chips and chip costs. You will turn into a soulless automaton if you want to get good at it.
I've been fixing everything fixable by myself for years. From "burned" dishwasher control boards and remote controlled ceiling fans, to laptops. I've also done some work on repairing/modding consoles. It's really fun as a hobby, but I would never make it my job.
DELET TIS
Why? It's the real deal. From official MSI youtube channel. before it got deleted
I've watched it many times, and I still find new disturbing details in it. Last one I noticed was that the CPU got pinned in a horribly bad angle in the zoom part on pressing down the latch.
Why not try to find all mistakes in that video? I have about 10 now. We could make a reverse-bingo out of it.
Fellow laserdisc player owner here, these things are about as analog as it gets; which in a weird way makes things a little more complicated. I'm pretty sure fixes were easier back in the 90s because you could simply get a new board from a trashed unit or something, but now you're pretty much limited to swapping capacitors. For additional fun, each capacitor swap will slightly change the characteristics of the player, even if you get the same exact one! General rule is to get a backup player from a school or something, but it's not going to be as awesome as a LaserActive.
Pic 1 is supposed to be gory, but I find it brutal as fuck.
Almost all but nu-age engineering majors are about staring at the abyss and hoping you make out of there alive just in time to be bossed around by some (((landwhale))) from L.A.
Imagine having to take about nine classes of different ways you could compute time and space itself only to get to one where you have to actually solder shit or program shit or study the inner workings of chemicals or whatever. If you're amerifat, you can at least claim it was a good investment.
Am I retarded?
That seems so obvious
Was that a magnet?