Guides

Make a Li-ion battery charging pack for your Xbox 360 controller.

A long time ago, Hack a Day did a breakdown on the rechargeable battery that you could buy for the Xbox 360 controller. There really wasn't a whole lot inside as a lot of your circuit for charging is actually in the charge cable. The only thing that was in the Xbox rechargeable battery is 2 Ni-Mh batteries rated at around 2100mAh, a thermal sensor, and a circuit board which has a little EEprom chip that simply informed the Xbox what kind of battery was installed into it.

In the spirit of the original hack posted by them. We will focus on working with replacing the battery cels in the Ni-Mh charger versus mutilating our Xbox controller. Now, for those reading this and want a super simple solution check out this blog about using just one battery and a diode. For those looking for that total conversion charger and all. Keep reading!

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Making a commercial-grade thermal printer work for your shipping and labeling needs.

This entry was started because for some reason throughout all of the years of repairing printers there hasn't really been a good article about thermal printer repair. Usually when you look-up problems with these types of printers you ether get sucked into trap sites that are trying to get your contact info. Forums that have a lot of dead links. Or some company that is only out to sell you a new thermal printer instead of fixing or even using the one that you already got. We're old-school Luddites and still believe the internet is a place for information. We will not sell you anything. If you find any of this information useful to you then awesome.

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I-Pac controller in a new case with cleaner wiring.

When I first started this blog I created a posting about how I could build a better controller for Stepmania by using a device called an I-Pac. In the MAME community the I-Pac does what modern day mechanical keyboards do by assigning each key its own interrupt onto a micro-controller giving you the absolute fastest response between your joystick and your PC. The only way you could go any faster then this device is by bypassing the USB bus all together and wiring your controller via GPIO onto something like a Raspberry Pi.

previously

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Installing a Wireless Antenna mod on your Ouya Console!

The Ouya while it does have a Wireless-N chip the quality of reception has a lot to be desired for it's wireless antenna. Consisting of a tiny block on the motherboard which behaves like a 3dbi antenna that one would expect on a Cel-Phone; The overall reception of wireless traffic coming into your Ouya especially at a distance is problematic. Initially, I did this mod in an attempt to alleviate Bluetooth lag on my Ouya joysticks as the chip-set that Ouya used carries both the Internet and Bluetooth traffic over the same wireless antenna. While it didn't help with the Joystick reception. It did help considerably with wireless traffic.

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It's time for Png Optimization yo!

For PNG Optimization: PNG (or Portable Network Graphics) was a replacement to GIF and is one of the most widely used lossless graphic formats on the net. Whenever you are setting up a website that has a heavy amount of images going for it; You often have to rely on other formats then JPEG or .jpg because although the .jpg is good for most cases such as photos it is often a self-destructive file to have as every time you re-compress the quality of the .jpg gets worse and worse. Also known as lossy compression where the image is compromised to better suit the compression of the file.

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Setting up Transmission on Pi.

Transmission is a torrent P2P file sharing software which is open source and can be run on practically every type of platform environment on the face of the earth.  Since torrents can take a long time to download depending on how many seeders there are (people with complete copies of said file) versus peers or leechers (people who are attempting to receive files) it makes sense to keep a device on that only takes a few watts of power versus a giant PC which just eats power throughout the night.

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Raspberry / Banana Pi with xboxdrv

I got you covered on this as well with the help of xboxdrv! Although a little late to the party the Rasbian image initially did not have the xboxdrv library like Ubuntu users were so used to. As a result, Raspberry Pi users had to go through the headaches of compiling it themselves or simply find an alternative such as a genetic joystick or Bluetooth based joystick control provided they have a Bluetooth style receiver.

Note: This blog entry is a child blog off of the chinese xbox 360 receiver entry. If you stumbled upon this page first and have no idea what the hardware is be sure and check out that blog by clicking here.

There is no drag and drop style method for any version of Linux, you'll have to be typing some commands to get it working.

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