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Arcade Stick Bluetooth Upgrade RAC-J500S

  I purchased a RAC-J500S arcade joystick to play some arcade games on Retro-Arch, I got the one with the Pac-Man art because my daughter liked it. The arcade stick comes ready to use and has ARC controller board that I can confirm works great on PC and Android, however there are problems with Android TV. The problems are in how Android TV maps the buttons of a USB controller, for some reason the buttons are mapped the same way as the remote controller. So one button on the arcade controller automatically opens Netflix, another YouTube, another Prime Video ... and so on. People has successfully gotten around this weirdness by using a button remapper app, unfortunately these conflicted with my other controller. When I purchased the Arcade stick I though it might be neat to make it wireless at some point in the future. Since apparently only wireless controllers work with Android TV I decided to go ahead swap out the controller board. I used  a Nice!nano clone because the it's u...
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FireFox User-Agent automatic switcher

This extension allows the user to spoof a user-agent on user selected pages. Simply enter the URL you would like to spoof the User-Agent on, select the desired user-agent and click the plus button to add the rule. Make sure the toggle at the top is set to enabled. If you are using this on a mobile browser and the site you are visiting still detects your browser as mobile you will have to enable the "privacy.resistFingerprinting" property in the mobile advanced configuration. Click on the extension icon from Firefox extensions and at the bottom click where it says "Copy Mobile Config URL" paste this into the Firefox address bar and then search for "privacy.resistFingerprinting"      With the user-agent spoofed as a desktop browser and "privacy.resistFingerprinting" set to true, mobile sites such as Reddit.com won't try and force you to install the mobile app to visit their page. On the desktop version of this extension there is a toggle to cha...
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Bluetooth Speaker TPA3118

    When I was digging though the attic I found some speakers I wasn’t using, and it occurred to me I could turn them into Bluetooth speakers for my bedroom. I believe they originally came with the sub-woofer I converted to a powered speaker in a previous build. I purchased The XH-M314 Bluetooth board off Aliexpress for the job. I purchased this particular model since it had everything I needed all in one board, and the TPA3118 AMP chip was made by Texas Instruments, a manufacturer known for quality. I placed the module in the right speaker and used the original speaker connector to send the signal to left speaker so only need to drill holes for the power connector and switch. Then it was only a matter of soldering 6 wires to the board.   Unfortunately the board is way too load for my tastes. The gain is maxed out, it sounds like the lady that says Bluetooth Connected is yelling at me, and unfortunately maxing out the gain raises the noise floor, so there is a bit of a ...
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Aliexpress DIY POV Fidget Spinner

  I wanted to make a video of the assembly of this electronics kit, but unfortunately my cheap camera rig wasn’t cooperating. I translated the manufactures assembly instructions , so I figured I’d post that along with a couple of still pics for anyone who was interested. The kit is all tiny surface mount components, so I would not recommend it as someone’s first electronics kit, soldering those tiny LEDs with can be tricky. The markings indicting polarity on the LEDs are tiny, so I recommend a magnifying glass or a multimeter with a diode polarity tester.  The spinner is a lot of fun once assembled and the patterns are pretty. The same manufacture offers a different kit with a programming header, I might try once I get my camera rig sorted out.  
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Aliexpress Timegrapher

    I recently purchased an inexpensive timegrapher off of Aliexpress, in order to improve the accuracy of a watch that has been losing considerably more time than my other watches. The included instructions are in Chinese which was less than handy, fortunately there are numerous tutorials on YouTube on using a timegrapher. You can use it with the Android app   TICKOPRINT   It also works with the Windows program TimeGrapher TG   although I had to go into my system settings and adjust the microphone volume all the way up in order to get the windows software to work.  If you are still having problems, there is an internal volume potentiometer connected to t he op amp. Adjusting it as pi ctured increases the volume. To get access remove bottom pads and the 3 screws on bottom. Here is a link to the timegrapher guide I am using to attempt to fix my watch.
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