However if you expand on this as a “port” hack I have one in which I had an AGP video card slot that got some mashed pins one time while trying to put a new video card in. I can’t remember any barrel hacks other then striped wire, the occasional needle to replace the center pin on a broken port, lots of foil. So was the ludicrous price for 3rd party stick adapters, especially when I found out how simple they were. Finally getting pinched one time too many was the inspiration for building the adapter. *One must be careful to not ‘choke down’ on the super stiff OEM TI-99 joyless sticks when playing fast twitch games like Tombstone City or you will pinch your pinky finger between the sharp bottom edge of the stick and the controller body. I did have to saw the screw ‘ears’ off the sides of the DE9 on my homebuilt joystick but small nothing to pay to be able to use it and the cheap thrift store sticks I had. Why use a DB25 instead of separate DE9’s? Money! Would have cost $2 or $3 more to build. Might have used shrink tube but far as I can recall the tape was more likely. To connect to the computer I used 9 separate wires to a DE9 and shell, with the wires bound up in electrical tape. Inside the shell I soldered small diodes to the pins, going by taking apart and ringing out a pair of TI Wired Remote Pinky Pinchers*, to make dual sticks work correctly. I used the insertable pin style connector and superglued a trapezoid of wood into the middle to make two sockets. There’s room to plug two molded DE9 joystick plugs into a DB25 side by side. Years ago I built a dual 2600 to TI-99 joystick adapter into a DB25 connector and shell. Fortunately the 12V shunt on the drive shunted (permanently) instead of blowing open. The internal USB to SATA adapter survived because it has a *very robust* 12 to 5 volt circuit and passes that protection on to the drive’s 5V input. For shame, Dymo! Also shame on Western Digital for providing zero protection on the 12V line in their MyBook hard drives. The “best” barrel jack trick I have was accidentally discovering that my Dymo LabelWriter 400 Turbo that takes 24VDC uses exactly the same connector as the vast majority of 12VDC devices. Speaking of prolonged shorts through clamp diodes, for those of you too young or insufficiently clumsy to have had the experience, watching your MCU turn into an incandescent lamp through the windowed CERDIP package produced an indescribable blend of awe and terror (and a strong incentive to knock off for lunch as that chip package will take a good while to cool). The downside is that you do have to be careful not to reverse the polarity when you don’t mean to since most devices get unhappy with prolonged shorts through their clamp diodes). As a bonus careful swizzling can allow polarity reversal for those rare but annoying devices that buck the ring-negative tip-positive convention. a pair of 100mill header pins on the power recipient end and matching header socket on the power supplying end) along with color coded heat shrink and then encapsulate the whole mess in a larger clear heatshrink tube with internal adhesive. I’ve also been known to chop the plug end off my wall-warts and ubiquitous cheap USB power cables put some other connector pair in the middle (e.g. Posted in hardware Tagged barrel connector, cobbled, function over fashion, function over form, functional, protoboard, solder, ugly Post navigation What’s your barrel connector trick and does it work reliably? The inside is contacted by thick copper wire with a kink to again provide spring action. hack is actually quite respectable! It appears to be a roll of copper (perhaps from tubing?) bent for a bit of spring tension on the outside of the barrel. If you can’t take the easy route of cutting off the connectors, what’s your go-to trick? Alligator clips are a horrid approach, and there aren’t really any clear winners that come to mind. Everyone has a box of old wall warts somewhere, exhibiting a wide range of barrel connector sizes. ![]() There is no link, aka screen-capped the image exchange and reminded us on the tip line.Ĭhances are you’ve faced this problem yourself. Necessity birthed the most straightforward solution which did not involve shredding a power adapter’s plug. In one of our Hack Chats, shared a couple of images wherein a barrel connector was needed, but there was no time to wait for one in the mail. Then there are the times where you need to throw scraps of copper at a prototyping board and strangle nine-volts out by any means necessary. ![]() A simple device, on a custom circuit board with inexpensive parts that will disrupt the status quo and make you a billion dollars in no time. ![]() Sometimes you get an epiphany for a project that will change the world.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |