Joystick horror story (with a happy ending)

[dphirschler]

Wow. If your mind is in the gutter, that sounds bad. Lol It gets worse. Read on to find out how my friend’s joystick would not go up.

 

I thought I’d share my story that happened today over lunch. A friend came over with some TI gear he just picked up. We tested out the joystick and the player one stick did not move up. Taking the stick apart, we decided to clean the contacts. So with some rubbing alcohol on a Qtip I cleaned the silver pad under the flexible board. To our horror, it cleaned the silver pad completely off! It was just GONE! I suppose those silver pads are nothing more than the same stuff on those scratch off lottery tickets. Too late now, it’s gone. So the lesson here is to only clean the underside of that flexible circuit board.

 

Not wanting to give up, I got some metal duct tape (the real metal stuff), and applied a small square of it where the silver rub off pad had been. Worked like a charm! In fact, maybe it works a little better. It felt really good. So there is a fix for bad joysticks, possibly even an improvement.

 

Now the thought occurs to me to use conductive paint instead of the metal tape. So that ought to fully restore it (probably better than when it was new). The conductive paint is normally used for repairing rear window defoggers in your car. This is theory, mind you. But then I am thinking this same technique could probably be used to restore and improve the Mitsumi keyboards. Aren’t they the same type of cheap-o contact?

So perhaps I have a weekend project here. 1) Paint all the points on a dead Mitsumi keyboard. 2) let it dry. 3) enjoy restored/working (improved?) keyboard.

Darryl

Edited October 15, 2014 by dphirschler

[Imperious]

I fixed my Mitsumi keyboard with a Pencil.

 

A good fix for remote controls is to punch a small circle of Aluminium foil and super glue it to the rubber pad part, just let the glue

dry for an hour to avoid the super glue fumes causing issues with the circuit board.

I also used this method to fix some game controllers, works real beaut.

[Tursi]

I recently bought a spool of "copper tape" (http://www.amazon.com/Copper-Conductive-Adhesive-Width-Length/dp/B009KB86BU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1413422141&sr=8-1&keywords=copper+tape) and this has worked well for such things -- no need to do anything special, it self-sticks and is conductive through the glue. I used it to rebuild some low-quality Dance Dance Revolution pads so I can attest that it will take a beating

[+hloberg]

Back in the day, when I was working my way through college a projectionist at a theater, we used this thin silver mylar tape on the edge of the film for lens changes. When my TI joystick quit working I re-taped the contacts with this tape. It fit perfectly and worked great. It looked like this.

Edited October 16, 2014 by hloberg