The ghetto mod thread

[goodpsusearch]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

I did a quick search on the Creative, and it looks like it already has all of the amplifies inside the sub enclosure. So really you just need to find some mid-range / tweeters for the "surround" speakers, and you should be set probably.

I got this sub with its back surround tweeters and the center speaker. The front left and front right tweeters are missing and unfortunately one of them had the control buttons. So the system is dead. I use the back tweeters to test repaired amplifiers since I don't care if they get damaged. But first I connect a speaker I took out from a trashed and broken black and white CRT TV.

The linear transformer is also missing but I can use a laptop adapter without issues here. Same goes to the Altec Lansing system that has a bad transformer. Tried laptop adapter and perfectly worked. But the quality of the sound is quite bad.

Yup, kind of did that already.
Well, the 4-ch amplifier IC for the subwoofer was already wired to 2-ch BTL. I just couldn't / didn't feel like trying to understand what was going on with the pre-amp and filter section since, as I mentioned, the PCB was missing pieces. So I just disabled the pre-amp section entirely, then uncoupled the inputs from the amp IC and hooked them directly to RCA stereo jacks, giving me a simple stereo amp to work with. Eventually, I enabled the other identical amp IC on the board and converted it to have 2 channels on BTL. So this "amp" contraption is now capable of driving 2x Left and 2x Right speakers in regular stereo mode - i.e. same as "speakers A" and "speakers B" on "conventional" stereo amps. Only limit at this point is the power adapter ("measly" 16.5V, 40 Watt) that was once part of an Altec Lansing or Cyber Acoustincs system (that I never got to see, actually.)

Anyways, I'll start typing up the post and hopefully post it sometime this year, lol. It's not really suitable for this thread, as it's an entire ghetto creation by itself.

That said, you can actually get a "hint" of what it looks like from the thread below (I won't spoil and tell you which picture it is. )
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=20886

lol speakers on top of speakers

that's something we have in common

if you remember the pic I posted from my bedroom, a cheap Philips mini hifi speaker is the base of the front right Dali Spektor 2 speaker....

...and my grandma's Winson speakers got repurposed as speaker stands for my Dali Zensor 3 big speakers I have on my living room.

But I need to fix the Sony AVR to make those Dalis sing. Right now they are not connected to anything

[RukyCon]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

This is more of a repair than a mod, but i assume it can still go here.

Story: So a few years ago, I got a 150w/10A electronic load off eBay, and when it arrived, it turned out the LCD was damaged in shipping, so after a bit of back and forth with the seller (and eBay stepping in) i got a full refund for the unit, and used the money to buy a replacement, while the broken one was put aside for parts.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, i doing a bit of cleaning when a brilliant idea popped into my head on a way to "fix" the broken unit. But first, i needed to find a new cooler, as i had stolen the old one off it for something else, so a bit of digging later, and I found an old Intel cooler, that appears to be slightly beefier than the Cooler Master one that came with the item originally.

So all i had to do was attach it and...

Fits like a glove
i don't know what that connector is for, and i don't care.

So now i just needed a power meter, and i had just the part.


I got this voltage/current display off eBay back in 2017 or so, for a DIY bench PSU, which I did build, but proceeded to end up killing by mistake, however, the display survived and ended up in storage, waiting to be put to use again.

So now it was time to put these things together, but first, i needed to find power for the display, only issue was it required 12v, and most of the unit runs off of 5v or 3.3v, but i did manage to find one trace with 12v on it, so i scraped away some solder resist and tacked a wire direct to it.


It's not pretty, but it works, and that's all i care about.

Next up was to try and figure out how to attach the current sense wires, and that was the tricky bit for me, as there wasn't an easy way to do it, but in the end, i did find a way, and that way was to move the input onto a daughter board.


So now was the moment of truth, i gave the unit power, and the display came to life, next i connected a power supply to the load and... Nothing happened.

As it turned out, the display i used had the current sense line common to ground, and the mistake i made was, i connected the current sense wires to positive, effectively shorting out anything i connected to it, which is exactly what happened to the power supply i connected.
So a bit of resoldering later, and...


It works.

Now, some may ask why i didn't get a new LCD, and the reason is that almost no one (except some shady back channel sites) had the right part. And even though some functionality is missing from this due to the repair, I honestly don't care much.

[momaka]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

I got this sub with its back surround tweeters and the center speaker. The front left and front right tweeters are missing and unfortunately one of them had the control buttons. So the system is dead. I use the back tweeters to test repaired amplifiers since I don't care if they get damaged. But first I connect a speaker I took out from a trashed and broken black and white CRT TV.

Yeah, always good to have a few "test speakers".
In my case, I use this Eminence Kappa Pro-15A speaker driver that I repaired for testing more heavy-duty amps. When turned upside down on my carpet, it can take quite a bit of power. Free-air, though, it doesn't take much before the VC reaches the same spot that made it go bad the first time. So I can't use that large driver open-air with too powerful amps.

The linear transformer is also missing but I can use a laptop adapter without issues here. Same goes to the Altec Lansing system that has a bad transformer. Tried laptop adapter and perfectly worked. But the quality of the sound is quite bad.

By bad sound quality, do you mean you hear extra noise? If so, that may be because of circuit grounding. Some laptop adapters tend to be noisy and cannot be used for audio gear unless their ground pin is disconnected. On others, you must make sure the ground is connected. It's weird, but I find that not all switching adapters play nice with my audio stuff. It also depends on the input source too.

lol speakers on top of speakers

that's something we have in common

And computers on top of computers?

...and my grandma's Winson speakers got repurposed as speaker stands for my Dali Zensor 3 big speakers I have on my living room.

LOL, bad/crappy speakers used as stands for something else... now where have I seen that before?
Ah yes! I used these crappy speakers - one as a make-shift night-stand in college (for putting my phone next to my bed), and the other as a make-shift computer stand. LOL! They are pure garbage otherwise.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, i doing a bit of cleaning when a brilliant idea popped into my head on a way to "fix" the broken unit. But first, i needed to find a new cooler, as i had stolen the old one off it for something else, so a bit of digging later, and I found an old Intel cooler, that appears to be slightly beefier than the Cooler Master one that came with the item originally.

So all i had to do was attach it and...
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...8&d=1647145473
Fits like a glove

Nice.
That stock Intel cooler actually looks better than the Cooler Master one on the working unit

So now it was time to put these things together, but first, i needed to find power for the display, only issue was it required 12v, and most of the unit runs off of 5v or 3.3v, but i did manage to find one trace with 12v on it, so i scraped away some solder resist and tacked a wire direct to it.
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...3&d=1647145473

It's not pretty, but it works, and that's all i care about.

Function over form... yup, pretty much my style too.

[Dan81]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

Since I was cheap and this is probably the only slotket I could ever find, I took a gamble and went ahead and modded it to work with Coppermines.



Not sure if it's really ghetto but the fact that I wouldn't want to spend money to get a proper slotket that supports CuMines out of the box is pretty ghetto for me. Not sure about voltages though I think the BE6-II I have bought must've adjusted itself accordingly (also have installed latest BIOS as security measure) to the Coppermine voltage since the Slot 1 versions don't run at a too big voltage to matter for this slotket (1.65v for Slot 1 vs 1.75v for 370 - if anything I might've undervolted the chips slightly )

The only chip I couldn't get to POST was a SL5QW, though not sure if the chip itself is defective or the BIOS simply didn't like it. I remember running it a few years ago (2 or 3, not much) on a EPOX EP-3VCM and it worked fine... something's quite amiss, but as long as I have a 133FSB SL4C8 Coppermine P3, I don't really mind.

[j.caps]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

Im glad i have found my thread.

well I dont have a lot of pictures of my "fixes". but people saw at the time what i used for a case and laughed.

my mining rig in 2014.

[stj]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

well - no cooling issues!!!

[goontron]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

Guess i throw my Ghetto fix for an ASIC card in an S19Pro out here.

And yes, it worked. But needed a modified firmware to do so

[goontron]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

I guess ill post this little "You will die when i say you can die" ghetto mod i did to my old smart phone. Gotta do what you gotta do when you live rural!

[eccerr0r]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

was thinking about doing that to my phones but once VoLTE became a requirement, that idea went out the window.

[Dan81]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

Gigabyte said I couldn't run FX chips on a 880GM-UD2H rev 1.0. They didn't say I couldn't upgrade the BIOS chips from 8Mb to 16Mb in order to enjoy FX chips though

Rev 1.5 is the one that offers the only BIOS to support FX chips (and only the 95W variety - they were among the boards that didn't do the cut with higher rated FX CPUs - apparently those needed more phases than the 4+1 that the 880GM-UD2H and a few others did (and who was the absolute idiot who thought running FX-8120 on a 3+1 phase M68MT-S2 was a good idea?? )

[momaka]

Dell Latitude E6400 CMOS battery 'repair' / replacement

As per the story at the bottom of this post, basically I had to do a CMOS battery replacement for a Dell Latitude E6400. For anyone that has worked on these, you probably know the CR2032 CMOS battery in these Dell laptops doesn't sit nicely in a holder on the motherboard. Instead, it's packed in an insulator and has a small cable coming out of it, like this:



I did have a few similar-looking ones from PS3 motherboards, but IIRC the connectors were different. Plus, I didn't feel like untangling, cutting, and splicing the short wires on the E6400 CMOS battery.

So I opted for something different. I carefully cut the blue insulation, making a small incision to extract the proprietary connector (which was tab-welded to the battery, but the welds were pretty easy to break off.) After this, I removed the insulation from the original (dead) CMOS battery and fitted a fresh CR2032 into the old insulation. Finally, I put back the connector on the new battery (just inserted the metal tabs that I snapped off from the old battery) and wrapped the whole contraption with electrical tape. The result was this:



Pretty? –NO.
Worked? –Yes!
Points awarded for “ghetto-ness”? –Maybe?

Note that (from the picture dates) this repair was done over 7 years ago when I bought the laptop for my uncle. It was a refurbished unit and everything worked pretty well on it… except for the dead CMOS battery. Back then, however, the 9-cell battery that came with the laptop still held a decent charge and could hold the laptop running for ~60-90 minutes.

Fast forward to 2021 (6 years later), and the CMOS battery was dead again. What happened this time, however, was that the charger ID wire became open or cut at some point. This led to the main battery to stop charging and becoming completely dead over time. With the laptop often kept unplugged, the replaced / “hacked” CMOS battery eventually died too, which then made the laptop start to boot-loop due to lost CMOS settings. My estimate is that the power adapter's ID wire probably got buggered somewhere around 2019-2020. So all in all, this ghetto fix lasted maybe a good 6 years (until mid-2021). Probably could have been more if the main battery didn't die or if the laptop was kept plugged in. We'll see how long this new CR2032 battery lasts. I told my uncle to stop keeping the laptop unplugged all the time. He thinks the laptop's adapter wastes a lot of power, because it feels very warm when he uses it. I thoroughly checked it and it runs just as warm as any laptop power adapter would. In fact, I had to thoroughly check it, because I had to fix the ID wire on it. After all, this is what caused the dead CMOS battery in the first place. I'll probably post that in the worthless repair thread, as a continuation of the power adapter I already put there.So if you're in for more “ghetto-ness”, just check that thread. Post will be put there probably a little later today or tomorrow.

[Topcat]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

^
I've done this before with a couple exceptions.... I use a big piece of heatshrink tubing, like the original....but obviously I can't spot-weld the tab back on after harvesting the wire/connector.... Take some fine sandpaper and lightly scuff both sides of the battery and then quickly tin those places on the batt with some solder (it will stick nicely). Then tin the ends of the wire....and then quickly solder it to the new batt. Then back to the heatshrink tubing, slip the batt in and shrink it down...and done. Just like it was born there!

I know....not ghetto enough for the thread....but hey....what can I say!!

[momaka]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

Thanks, will keep it in mind for next (3rd time) around.

Well, even if I wanted to do it your way, I couldn't have, because I did it all at my uncle's house with minimum of tools. No heat shrink tubing.

The 2nd time around, I did have tools and HS tubing... but I figured if the 1st one lasted 6 years, then whatever, I'll do it just the same. Kind of lazy, but it's an old laptop already.

I know....not ghetto enough for the thread....but hey....what can I say!!

Well, you do this for a living, so I imagine customers wouldn't be too pleased if you churn out ghetto hacks like mine all the time.

On the other hand, ghettomodding is a lifestyle for me.
(Hence my repairs are pretty much always free. )

[Xenon-Codex]

Re: Dell Latitude E6400 CMOS battery 'repair' / replacement

As per the story at the bottom of this post, basically I had to do a CMOS battery replacement for a Dell Latitude E6400. For anyone that has worked on these, you probably know the CR2032 CMOS battery in these Dell laptops doesn’t sit nicely in a holder on the motherboard. Instead, it’s packed in an insulator and has a small cable coming out of it, like this:



I did have a few similar-looking ones from PS3 motherboards, but IIRC the connectors were different. Plus, I didn’t feel like untangling, cutting, and splicing the short wires on the E6400 CMOS battery.

So I opted for something different. I carefully cut the blue insulation, making a small incision to extract the proprietary connector (which was tab-welded to the battery, but the welds were pretty easy to break off.) After this, I removed the insulation from the original (dead) CMOS battery and fitted a fresh CR2032 into the old insulation. Finally, I put back the connector on the new battery (just inserted the metal tabs that I snapped off from the old battery) and wrapped the whole contraption with electrical tape. The result was this:



Pretty? –NO.
Worked? –Yes!
Points awarded for “ghetto-ness”? –Maybe?

Note that (from the picture dates) this repair was done over 7 years ago when I bought the laptop for my uncle. It was a refurbished unit and everything worked pretty well on it… except for the dead CMOS battery. Back then, however, the 9-cell battery that came with the laptop still held a decent charge and could hold the laptop running for ~60-90 minutes.

Fast forward to 2021 (6 years later), and the CMOS battery was dead again. What happened this time, however, was that the charger ID wire became open or cut at some point. This led to the main battery to stop charging and becoming completely dead over time. With the laptop often kept unplugged, the replaced / “hacked” CMOS battery eventually died too, which then made the laptop start to boot-loop due to lost CMOS settings. My estimate is that the power adapter’s ID wire probably got buggered somewhere around 2019-2020. So all in all, this ghetto fix lasted maybe a good 6 years (until mid-2021). Probably could have been more if the main battery didn’t die or if the laptop was kept plugged in. We’ll see how long this new CR2032 battery lasts. I told my uncle to stop keeping the laptop unplugged all the time. He thinks the laptop’s adapter wastes a lot of power, because it feels very warm when he uses it. I thoroughly checked it and it runs just as warm as any laptop power adapter would. In fact, I had to thoroughly check it, because I had to fix the ID wire on it. After all, this is what caused the dead CMOS battery in the first place. I’ll probably post that in the worthless repair thread, as a continuation of the power adapter I already put there.So if you’re in for more “ghetto-ness”, just check that thread. Post will be put there probably a little later today or tomorrow.

No need to take the battery out from the plastic package, if there's room for the "cover".

[momaka]

Re: Dell Latitude E6400 CMOS battery 'repair' / replacement

No need to take the battery out from the plastic package, if there's room for the "cover".

This is pure GENIUS!

I will definitely keep this trick in mind for next time.
In my case, my C2032 battery came loose without a package (can't remember what I scraped it from), so I couldn't really do it this way.

But man, I'm still laughing and admiring the idea at the same time.

[Xenon-Codex]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

I had this Compaq 310Evo case from 2003, and a surplus Fujitsu P520 motherboard. Only needed to modify the PSU to use the Fujitsu power, and the front panel connector.

[Dan81]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

My LG lacked a stand. So, I got a HP stand for a completely old Horizon VGA monitor, and its own stand now got to be used on the LG.

[momaka]

EMF-60 power strip USA-2-EU plug mod

As some of you may have gathered from other threads, I moved to live from the USA to Europe. Of course, I also took some of my computer “toys” with me… and naturally, all of the associated cabling too. Now we all know the obvious differences between electrical systems in USA and EU-land: one is 120V AC and the other is 230V AC. Not a problem for any of my PCs, since they all either have a red selector switch for the voltage (and you best bet I set these switches on all of my PSUs before shipping them to Europe , should someone have grabbed one of them and plugged it in) or are APFC / “full range”.

Well, that’s not the problem here. The problem is, I just don’t have that many IEC 60320 C13 power cords (i.e. the standard 3-pin PC power cord that goes into desktop PSUs) with an EU “Schuko” plug on the other end. But being that I shipped nearly all of my cables, I did have plenty of these power cords with a US plug. For anyone that knows me, I just hate to buy new stuff if I already have something that I can use, even if it requires a little bit of work / modifications.

Of course, I anticipated all of this EU power cord “shortage” for my PCs, so I also shipped a couple of USA extension cords / power strips. I think you can see where this is going now, don’t you? If not, just have a look at the pictures below of this latest and greatest (“janky”) idea:



It’s a no-brainer, really! - Remove the USA male plug and install a “Schuko” one instead. Right? (Or if you are lazy, just get an EU-to-USA wall plug adapter and use it directly on the male end of the power strip… but do yourself a favor and just make sure the adapter is a high[er] quality one, because the cheap ones often develop a bad/loose connection between input and output pins and then could end up in smoke/fire. Just ask how I know this. )

Well, not quite. You see, you can’t just put an adapter on any good ol’ USA power strip and call it done. Some have, as the name of this ECG Products EMF-60 “surge suppressor” implies… surge suppression (wow, imagine that!) In reality, this is only a fancy way of saying there is a Metal-Oxide Varistor (MOV) in there. Plugging in an US power strip like this would very likely make any MOV(s) inside it “trip” and short-circuit, which is No bueno.

So what’s the solution?
- Open the power strip and disconnect the MOV.



There, that ought to do it! … except there is one more problem. Well, it’s not necessarily a problem, but people with electronics OCD like me can’t let even such small things go. What’s not shown in the above pictures is that the red switch has an AC-connected light indicator in it. The light indicator in these switches is typically an AC-connected neon lamp with a series resistor –all built into the switch. On 120V AC, I checked the AC current draw with my multimeter and got around 0.3 mA, if I remember correctly. But with Euro 230V AC power, I got over 2 mA of current. Again, I could have just left it alone and let the little series resistor (or the neon lamp) burn itself out, and likely nothing would have happened, except this power strip would have lost/damaged its indicator light permanently. Like I said, though, I have an electronics OCD and didn’t want to leave it like this. So, to disconnect the neon indicator lamp in the switch, I simply just disconnected the “Neutral” (white) wire from the switch, which I then put insulation over (electrical tape + that gray wire insulation.)

So with all of the above mods, this essentially turned the “surge suppressor” power strip into just a plain power strip / switch. The only other note I have to mention here is that, as some of you may know already, EU “Schuko” plugs are not exactly polarized by design, so it’s ambiguous on which side / blade in the US plug the Live line can end up in. But I did it one better here too: I drew a black ring on one of the prongs of the male Schuko that goes to where the Live side would be expected on the USA plugs. Then I used an AC probe to check on which side was the Live for the EU Schuko plugs I was interested in plugging in this power strip. And that’s that.

Now in case anyone is wondering why I used such a “crummy” power strip (with all of that blue paint, dings, and whatnot) – it was a dumpster rescue from my former workplace back in 2020. It came with the male end already cut off. I thought about putting a new one on it, but never got around to it. Well, as I was digging through stuff to get them shipped to EU, that’s when I found this again and the idea immediately sprung in my head. Needless to say, I probably will be converting a few more power strips like this, though it would involve only removing/disconnecting their MOVs and possibly neon lamps (if they have them.) Otherwise, I have found very good quality EU-to-US power adapters that aren’t very expensive (certainly a lot less than buying 10+ new power cables.) So I probably won’t be cutting the male ends on the other power strips.

[Xenon-Codex]

These dump-salvages needed some work: LUxman L-435 has the source selector replaced with a relay card, and the Sony TA-F170 needed a new volume potentiometer. Didn't fit until I chopped two PCB's.