#tech repair

[autistictrekky]

How this evening’s going:/

(If anyone has any tips on how to save a laptop from water damage, hypothetically, please lmk) (the hypothetical laptop is powered off, with battery removed, upside down to drain, but it was showing some pretty scary glitch squares before it was, hypothetically, shut off)

[green-mug-tomato-juice]

hi i wanna tell you about one of my ongoing futile diy repair projects. my frankenstein headphones. i say futile because no normal person would have seen this mess of a headphone and thought wow, the countless hours i will be putting into this will absolutely be worth it for the money i will save by not buying new headphones. it's just that i'm a bit crafty and like handmade things, but mostly i'm very neurotic and once i get an idea in my head i can't not complete it, whatever the cost.

so to start a few years ago i bought a pair of onestyle HS-ANC-01 for around 40€. at the time that was very cheap for bluetooth headphones. they looked like this:

i loved them, i liked their sound quality and they fit me very comfortably for hours. they had some awful noise cancelling i never used which i'm pretty sure was just a white noise track, and they were made of incredibly cheap crappy plastic.

i was like whatever i just want comfy headphones. i bought them and within a few months the plastic of the headband broke straight through at the top. they no longer had any pressure on them, wouldn't cover my ears and would fall off if i moved my head too much.

so i was like what can i do about this, and after ruining a steel ruler trying to bend it into shape to replace the headband, i realized we had some cheap plastic headbands lying around. you know the kind you push back your hair with or glue bunny ears on for easter. so first i tore off the cracked headband plastic (literally, i don't remember where exactly but i definitely had so snip some of the plastic with pincers, couldn't just unscrew it) and then cut a cheap headband into shape to replace it. this was crappy: still not enough pressure and way too thin.

i realized that to have enough pressure on the ears, the end of the headband had to come down all the way over the ear pads. the individual headbands weren't long enough however. so the insane thing i did then (and i really regret not having progress pics of this) was stacking two overlapping plastic headbands on top of the first one and strapping them to it and to the ear pads with a shit ton of duct tape, each coming down over the ear pad on one side and overlapping in the middle. then to make it a little more neat looking, i put some black body tape over the duct tape.

and then it was great for a while! they fit really well again, still worked just fine, they just weren't foldable anymore. i was proud that i had saved such a shitty cheap product that most people wouldn't consider worth saving from the dump, and walked around with my frankenstein headphones like this.

BUT OF COURSE it wasn't meant to last. like pleather fucking does every single time the pleather cushion cover started to crumble all over me a few months later. i think you can buy cheap cloth covers in that case, but i was too invested in these headphones now. they were my handmade child. my daughter(s). so naturally i made perfectly geometrically fitting paper templates of the headphones surfaces and transferred them to soft dark red fabric and hand-sewed my headphones into them. i wasn't even thinking oh what if i need to wash this cover, i just left a hole for the charger and was going to trap them in this comfy jersey prison forever.

i gotta say they looked cool as fuck like this, like they were wearing a perfectly tailored full body sock. and they were MUCH more comfortable! even if your headphones are perfectly fine, i highly recommend sewing them into soft stretchy fabric.

anyways of COURSE they started to stink after a while. so i opened a seam and when i took them out black pleather bits rained down on me. i was like fuck this shit and just tore off all the pleather. underneath were these disgusting looking cushions. idk if they're supposed to look like that, and they feel a bit greasy too. o_o surprisingly they don't smell.

i washed all of it and sewed a long ass zipper to the back of the sock. then, to make sure the cushions would stay in place without the pleather holding it down, i had to sew my fabric to the mesh and foam sheet that cover the speaker. the mesh and foam sheet i had to sew to the round piece of plastic that snaps the ear cushion to the speaker. it's all very complicated and stupid

this is how it looks turned inside out now:

with the cushions pulled around the plastic bits again where they belong, it looks like this↓. now you have the two major parts, the unwashable (left) and the washable (right):

to put them back together, you snap the plastic bits to the speakers:

pull the whole sock on:

an then zip it all up. that part is soooooooo satisfying <3 (the zipper is in the back of course, it would look weird in front):

was it worth it? no. would i do it again? yes because i have no self control

they actually look very expensive now even though technically i didn't spend any money on making them look that way; every material i used was stuff i already had lying around. i don't think anyone would guess at the soup of cheap tech and random things from my house and sweat and blood that's inside. what a weird creature. my beautiful child

ANYWAYS SHORTLY AFTER I INSTALLED THE ZIPPER THE CHARGING SOCKET FUCKING BROKE. THEY ARE DEAD. I HAVE TO USE THEM WITH AN AUX CORD LIKE IT'S 2014 NOW. I HAD TO BUY AN AUX TO USB C ADAPTER CAUSE PHONES DON'T HAVE HEADPHONE JACKS ANYMORE. HAPPY TIMES

[noxx-notions]

Things I've taken apart and fixed this year so I didn't have to buy a new one:

Sewing machine (replaced the feed gears)

Laptop (replaced the ssd and switched to linux, replaced the battery, replaced the fan)

Computer mouse (cleaned and fixed the scroll wheel so it doesn't get stuck)

I also modded my kindle which I'm counting here

BUT I FEEL SO ACCOMPLISHED. AND I SAVED SO MUCH MONEY. AND I LEARNED NEW THINGS.

[sibyl-of-space]

REPAIR LOG - Benjie X1 MP3 Player

TL;DR if you know anything about capacitive touch panels and/or soldering tiny bullshit, please hit me up.

SYMPTOMS/DIAGNOSIS: shattered touch screen (ran over it with my bike…)

STEPS TAKEN: dismantled, traced connections, researched possible replacements

STATUS: confirmed schematics / connections to main board

NEXT STEPS: well... great question. I have all the information I need, I think. Look, that diagram up there? I scanned and labeled that shit! That was not available anywhere so I traced those connections! I have the understanding... but not the tools.

More below.

This little dongle connected the shattered capacitive touch panel to the main board. It uses a CST716 controller chip. I traced the connections on it so theoretically, if I had a different touch panel using the same chip, and I wanted to hate myself, I could wire it in to work.

I say "theoretically" because I don't have a tiny enough soldering iron tip or steady enough hands to actually do that in practice.

[CST716 pinout from here.]

Like, I have a part that I could "theoretically" solder in to test. It's too big and uses a CST816 chip, but it *sounds* like those chips are mostly compatible, so I might be able to BS it. At the very least I could wire it up and see anything happens, and from there refine my search for a more appropriate touch panel.

...But that's just not actually possible. I literally do not have the tools or motor skills to do wiring this precise. Maybe if I bought some nice tools and included a magnifying glass and shit I could learn to do it, but with my current setup, it's literally not possible.

Which means, my options are:

Wait until I have income again, procure nicer tools, and try this proof-of-concept. AKA "project goes on indefinite hiatus"—this makes the project most likely to succeed in the long run, as it means knowledge is the sole limiting factor, but it'll be a while before I actually get good enough tools to make it feasible.

Find a touch panel that uses the exact same 10-pin connector I need wired the exact same way. This would be easy if buying a Benjie X1 for parts on eBay were a thing you can do, but it was a cheapo MP3 player people throw away when they're done with it, so that's not a thing. This would be best case scenario, but is proving really difficult unless someone very knowledgeable reaches out with the magic set of search terms that will get me exactly that. Or if anyone just happens to know of some other gadget that uses a 2"x1.5" touch digitizer with this same connector that could be procured for parts instead.

Find literally any other circuit board that uses that 10-pin connector that then has bigger solder points, so I could use that as an in-between to zombie another screen on. This would still be annoying but possibly more realistic than #2? But also requires knowing how to search for the exact connector I need.

Secret 4th option? I know there are places that let you design and print a custom circuit board, something like that maybe??

Anyway, I'm going to keep searching different combinations of parts in different places, but I am no longer that optimistic. If you happen to know anything about finding and replacing touch panels for devices nobody else seems to give a shit about repairing, or about working with tiny PCBs, I am all ears and would appreciate your wisdom.

Otherwise I'll probably wait and save up for better tools. Advice appreciated if applicable!

[calypsojuicebox]

Project 1:

I bought a broken 3DS XL on eBay with a broken button and wireless connection issues

Problems: left shoulder button ribbon cable was snapped and WiFi chip busted

Fixed: replaced ribbon cable and WiFi chip

[secondwhisper]

Headphone covers from scrap fabric

My partner's headphones have pleather ear cushions, which started peeling and shedding after a year or two of use.

The pleather backing, underlying foam padding, and all of the technical bits of the headphones were still in great shape. So I decided to cover the ear cushions, making them more comfortable and less able to shed little bits of plastic.

Early tests indicated that one layer of t-shirt jersey material would be comfortable against my partner's ears without significantly impacting audio quality. This means I didn't have to first pattern and then hand-sew an oval donut shape to match the original ear cushions. So I just cut one sleeve off an old t-shirt from my scrap pile, cut that in half, and trimmed the seams off. I pinned those rectangular-ish fabric pieces to each ear of the headphones, sewed around the base of the cushions with a curved needle and two-strand embroidery floss, pulled it tight, then trimmed the excess fabric.

Here's the finished repair:

The stitching isn't as tight or neat as I'd like because it was my first time using a curved needle. If it doesn't last I'll just rip the stitches and do it better next time.

The verdict: The sound quality is minimally impacted by the extra fabric in the center. The jersey is not grippy like pleather, so the headphones slide around a bit more on my partner's head than they used to. 7/10, good enough.

[v0idprince]

opening up

before working at a cell phone repair shop I didn’t really get the robotfuckers but now.. well.. I’ll describe it.

I was opening up an ipad i wasn’t exactly sure the model of, but i knew generally where to avoid cutting into it. Sliding my blade gently under the screen, holding the heated aluminum close to me through my gloves. I kept the screen on, monitoring it for LCD damage as i ran my blade under it. If i pressed too hard, the screen would blanch white, telling me i had pressed too deep underneath it. Real-time feedback from the machine in my hands, yelping in pain, telling me i had done too much just before i broke it.

I pressed on, sliding forward under the screen to separate the adhesive, then pulling back before the fragile glass buckled under the plastic card i was using. I teased it, moving forward then back, slicing slowly until it began to peel away from it’s frame, eventually revealing itself to me.

As the screen came away from it’s frame, i saw the sticky adhesive separate under my fingers, and moved onto the next side of the iPad. I had to be careful, i knew the fragile LCD flex cables were located on either this side, or it’s opposite. I wasn’t sure, but I trusted my own skill enough to not break them. Using my plastic card, carefully, sliding down under the screen, pushing it to open just a little bit more for me. I poured a little alcohol on it, making the tricky adhesive wet under the screen, easier to pull the delicate LCD away from the aluminum frame. I had to be careful not to press too deep- this time at risk of slicing open the cables, tearing them, or possibly causing a short. I pressed down gently, revealing enough of an opening to see the little fold of a flex cable underneath the screen. it’s tucked away, used to being pressed flat underneath the screen, now aching to lift into the opening. i carefully drag my card around it, separating the adhesive with care. the screen is still on as i pry it away, and it turns on and off as my fingers pull its face off. Whenever my fingers brush the digitizer it blinks awake, responding to my knowing touch.

I finally, gently pull the screen away, unscrewing the housing underneath the screen. Small, mental plates cover the motherboard, protecting it’s small components. They give way easily once all the screws have been carefully twisted off and set aside. I slide my card underneath the battery connector, sending the device in front of me into peaceful slumber while i work on its internals. I wish it a soft rest, hoping it knows i will be gentle. i press my fingernail under the flex connector, prying it upward enough to hear the satisfying click of it undoing itself for me.

Finally, the screen pulls free of its housing, separated from the brains of the device, ready to be repaired.

[creativestudiofire]

Why do all my interests end in back pain

Is my final form just truly a shrimp

Why?

I breathed and my back popped. I’m 18