I am aware, my gorgeous readers, that the blog has been languishing of late. This is down to the fact that I foolishly agreed to write a book which is, and I am not sure if you are aware of this, hard. Luckily I should have more time to spout off here now that it is all turned in, however. As ...
Author Archives: Beko Pharm
Shawshank (Void If Removed)Can you believe that!? It’s bullshit. BULLSHIT I SAY! Yeah, I’m being mostly silly – they changed all the covers on the Twilight books. Geezy-creezy. I’m still trying to complete the sets I h…
Oarrr I hate when they suddenly change the cover or, worse, the size of a book series! My inner monk is going nuts on this. There is always one in a line on the shelf where they did this.
So fun story. I got a lot of "panel covers" lately. Considering to make use of some. Yay or nay?
I write little lately. I read little lately. I doom-scroll a lot lately. After many winter weeks with grey skies and rain, the Sun came out and Spring flowers are blossoming. It should make me feel brighter on the inside, but outside greyness left a seemingly permanent mark on
Replacement pads for Sony headphones
That was really about time. Let’s hope the replacement pads hold up to their promise. I really don’t want to life without my ANC headphones any more 😅
Update 9th Dec 2022: The replacement parts fit perfectly on my MDR-1000ABN but that’s about it. The noise cancelling itself was far better with the original pads. The foamed material is simply another density. There is even noise _from_ the foam just from moving the head slightly. That was especially pronounced in the beginning.
Nine months in and they look almost as bad as the original ones _after several years_. Torn at every corner just without the same wear, as you can see on the pictures that show only two pads. And this time I didn’t even use the headphones for workouts – only for work at a computer.
The other picture shows the freshly attached replacements from 9 months ago and the original pads (replaced after several years) next to the headphones.
That is really disappointing. Also from Sony for not offering proper replacement parts in the first place.
CY-822A with analogue input
This is a brief description how to mod an CY-822A USB joystick controller into accepting analogue input. I’ve done this modification now with two of my PCBs and worked with both for an extended period of time without any problems. To achieve this two things have to be done – at your own risk!
The PCB comes with 5 analogue axes according to my Linux PC and sdl2-jstest and while I’m not sure where the 5th is located a tiny modification will allow us to use at least 4 of the axes.
Locate the resistors R1 – R8 on the front that make up for 4 possible connections for analogue input with the use of potentiometers. There are 2 resistors with ~10k on the PCB that have to go. The 2 resistors hold 4 of the 5 axes perfectly still in the centre because the middle lane is bridged on the backside. This is the part where the conductor path has to be interrupted. Locate the central lane and simply scratch off the track with a sharp knife. Also clean all the holes of R1 to R8 so you can solder in some new pins for easier access. Use a multimeter to make sure that none of the 4 central soldering points are connected with each other any more. The upper and lower ones stay connected (Plus and GND).
Next we want to remove the zero ohm resistor at J1 and add a wire bridge instead. Look for an resistor with a single black ring next to R2, remove it, and solder in the wire bridge next to R1. This is basically a jumper setting but with a bridge. I’ve no idea why the designer went with a zero ohm resistor and not with a bridge. My only guess is that this was cheaper for the assembly machines.
Anyway, this will make the board boot in analogue mode so we do not have to use a mode switch on power on every time. This serves two purposes: Axes are now read from input and actually send as joystick events on the USB wire while the former digital joystick connector (5 pins) is now mapped to Up/Down/Left/Right buttons – so no extra buttons are needed here any more (but can still be added, of course).
Now it’s time to connect potentiometers as analogue inputs. This is pretty straight forward. Just make sure that the central connector goes to the centre of each axes. Change the upper with the lower pin if the direction is not as desired.
Please note that any axes that has no input attached will report _a lot_ of jitter making your game/app go nuts. This is what the former resistors at R1 and R2 were there for.
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Found a tree in my chainsaw. It’s all cleaned now. Btw this is such a joy to operate because it’s so quiet! I really like silent tools.
Another flawless #Fedora dist upgrade. I swear Linux is becoming more boring by the day. It just works™ 😂