Entrepreneur and inventor with a huge passion for technology striving to find elegant solutions for complex problems
Had an issue with a Linx 10 (model 1010B) tablet: touching anywhere on the screen would end up opening up Windows Start menu and touch registration was behaving erratically. This made the tablet pretty much unusable without mouse and keyboard attached. The fix turned out to be very simple.
Continue reading “Sometimes it is worth just to wiggle the wires”
Recently I bough a faulty Wanhao Duplicator 4S to increase the capacity of my 3D printing requirements as I already own one and know the machine inside out. eBay seller’s description wrote that the 3D printer stalled in the middle of a print. I did some digging across the internet before I purchased the machine and was suspecting that some wires were not shielded correctly which resulted in electromagnetic interference. It cost me £300 and that’s half of the retail price so even if I couldn’t be able to fix it, I would have plenty of spare parts for my current 3D printer.
I had recently bought a Rock Band 3 Wii keyboard which has come down in price to around £10 with an intention to connect it to a cheap Chinese USB to MIDI interface cable for around £3 pictured above to do some MIDI experiments on my computer. Videos online demonstrated that connecting the IN connector to the keyboard and USB cable to the PC was all that was needed to use it, but I just couldn’t get it working. The Rock Band keyboard detected a MIDI cable and switched to MIDI mode, PC properly detected USB MIDI device, but there were no messages in the MIDI-OX application. That’s when I decided to open up the plastic casing to find a few surprises…
Continue reading “Cheap USB MIDI cable: some self assembly may be required”
A few weeks ago I found this boxed Syma S031G helicopter in a ModelZone store on a special shelf where they are selling broken or otherwise non working gadgets. There were more of those broken helicopters for sale, but they were in a range of £30 and were listed as having RC transmitter problems or other faulty parts. It wouldn’t have made sense buying one without investigating if repairs wouldn’t even cost more than a new heli retailing for £59.99 at the same store (or 30% cheaper on eBay). Mine only had a handwritten sticker “broken” stuck to it and a price of £9.99. A quick inspection through the box didn’t show any signs of significant damage and shop assistant was kind enough to let me open the box and check if it had all parts. Transmitter, charger, heli, instructions and even spare rear propeller was in the box so I decided to take the risk and bough it.