A Switch-derella story

Long story short. Bought a DIRTY switch for $40. I didn't even test that it was working. I wasn't sticking a charger into this thing until I'd cleaned it. 

Cleaning turned into corrosion removal, and deciding the case was unsalvageable. 

I decided to throw in a spare modchip I had, and order a nice new shell from AliExpress. 

While trying to remove the screen from the digitizer though (scratched to hell. Total mess) I goofed. Removal is always a crapshoot. Not something I'd do to anything but my own devices.... Replacement for a whole screen was only $30. So...

Completed. Modded. Clean and looking good. 

Sometimes things don't go to plan.

Recently I had a difficult customer. 

He maybe didn't know about my recent issues with vertigo, or that I'm right now, a full time dad. But I diagnosed his issue (cleaning would not work. The analog had been damaged and had a plastic part stuck under the stick) and offered a solution, despite his prickly attitude or jabs at my ability. 

In the end. He wanted the Fortnite controller to be perfect. So we could swap another controllers innards with this so it would work. 

The first controller wouldn't quite work. Much older board. In my rush to help him, I didn't reseat some ribbons successfully. 

He attempted to provoke me. Instead, I dealt with the issue with a level head. My test PS5 decided to not respond to controllers during this (if this happens. Power out. Leave out for 30 seconds from console btw). 

He underpaid for all the work I put in. No point in losing my cool, or wasting any further energy on him however. 

I don't list everything I do on here. Just things that come with a neat story. Or are slightly out of the ordinary. 

Out of my usual wheelhouse

Recently helped a rather lovely dude named Jeff with 5 sets of Playstation 3D glasses for a 3D display you see every so often. 

I sold him my old 3D display minus glasses a few months back. And he let me know he had a bunch of glasses that needed batteries replacing. 

Well... How hard could it be? 

It was two hours, where the hardest part was safely opening the glasses. My pry tool was ready. I however... Was less than clued up about how these glasses worked. 

Spent more time trying to make them light up... Not realizing there was a tiny "battery on" switch that needed to be on. After figuring out the first pair, those that followed went with few casualties. 

Only Jeff is allowed to bring more of these :p they're truly painful to take apart safely!

Recently 

Game Gear recap-madcap.

Not the worst Sega Game Gear I'd ever seen, but was already prepared for the smell of removing these old caps (the blocky rectangular black and beige things above). They stink of fish. 

I recapped with surface mount ceramic caps, much smaller surface area than the originals, will never leak, and you can't mess up polarisation with them. 

I did go back and retouch some of the soldering afterward, as I ended up removing the dead fluorescent bulb, and trying an LED backlight mod, which you can see below, running Golden Axe Warrior on Master system (I was testing with an AliExpress flash cart.)

note the pink line on the right side and no power LED. I went back to fix that, and things just got uglier and messier, which is common with these old screens. So... This project is officially going to get a proper modern screen, likely a hispeedido. Update on that later. 

Long time. bit distracted between kids and delivery job.

Today, Colton brought me five pokemon gen 2 carts. 4 needing replacement batteries. One... The very expensive Crystal version, that was booting to a black screen. 

There was some tiny issues with the board. Which I cleaned. I started poking the pins to check for continuity to the chips, and found all traces had perfect continuity. Noticed a few suspect looking solder points though. So reflowed the chips with my Atten 862D, and... We have life. (Shoved it into my Hamtaro Shell to test)

Sorted the other carts out with their battery mods, and all was good! 

Revisiting some of my earlier soldering

You don't realize just how far you come when it comes to repairs. 

I got this controller back in Scotland around 2009 or 2010. I wasn't soldering regularly other than my own little projects. Wasn't adding extra flux. Wasn't cleaning up flux residue from the solder I was using either. Was using a rubbish iron set too high, and lifted lots of pads. 

Went back and cleaned this up. Added some solder mask. I'll update the post later with the finished controller (and it's friend that I need to do. Should I pop pink or white lights into it?)

Another Christmas emergency

Trevor's kid really wanted to bring his switch to the last day of school tomorrow, but both his (rather awesomely coloured) joycons were drifting like mental. 

Quick 20 minutes later and they were like new again. 

I clean them up nicely as well as fixing them.