{"id":268,"date":"2008-11-02T11:44:40","date_gmt":"2008-11-02T15:44:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.the500footbuddha.com\/?p=268"},"modified":"2008-11-02T11:44:40","modified_gmt":"2008-11-02T15:44:40","slug":"when-things-break","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.the500footbuddha.com\/?p=268","title":{"rendered":"When Things Break"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I might have been having some trouble getting the time I wanted in the demo for <a title=\"if you preorder you get a cool yellow bag\" href=\"http:\/\/www.mirrorsedge.com\/\">Mirror&#8217;s Edge<\/a>, which if you haven&#8217;t already I suggest you check this game out.  The end result is that a controller might have received the brunt of this frustration with the game.<\/p>\n<p>I have several broken controllers in my basement.  Jo and I bought them a while ago in order to take the cases and see if we could dye, paint, or do something to change the color on a more permanent basis.  I believe the final verdict was no &#8211; everything eventually rubs off.  What I am left with though is a plethora of parts to cannibalize in cases like this where I need to fix something.<\/p>\n<p>This was basically the first time I soldered anything.  I watched Jo do the LED&#8217;s when we were changing LED&#8217;s on controllers, which was a huge success, but I only helped a little.  This was different.  This was a piece of hardware held on to the board by about a dozen points.<\/p>\n<p>I went to a local store and bought about $20 in supplies.  I needed solder, wick (which is basically this braided copper wire that is supposed to take solder off boards), a vacuum gun (you push the handle in and it sucks the solder off the board when you press the button), and a solder gun holder, since I just had the really cheap one that came with my solder gun.<\/p>\n<p>That accomplished I set about my task.  I started to remove the piece that broke.  I put on another piece from another controller.  Everything went slowly and I sort of learned how to do certain things.  Put the controller back together, and sure enough the piece that I took was broken.  It&#8217;s the right analog stick, so it controls in FPS games which way you look, and this piece wants to look up.<\/p>\n<p>Back to the basement I take another piece from another controller, and this time it went a little faster.  I was starting to get the hang of taking pieces off boards.  I put the controller back together, brought it upstairs, and this time it was a success.  The controller is working perfectly now.  I&#8217;m glad it was that piece and not my solder job or something else, because I wouldn&#8217;t have known where to begin checking the solder.<\/p>\n<p>I feel very accomplished today.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">_______________________________________<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><a title=\"You can see the piece below the board and you can see how many points there are on the board for me to have to touch in order to get the piece off, and then put solder on to get it back on.\" rel=\"lightbox[solder]\" href=\"http:\/\/the500footbuddha.com\/pics\/solder\/IMG_0434.JPG\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/the500footbuddha.com\/pics\/solder\/IMG_0434.JPG\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"130\" \/><a title=\"This is my new bench for these sorts of things.  It's a broken end table in my basement that I have a light sitting on and ran an extension cord so I could power everything.  It worked out great and if I mess up the table I won't care.\" rel=\"lightbox[solder]\" href=\"http:\/\/the500footbuddha.com\/pics\/solder\/IMG_0436.JPG\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/the500footbuddha.com\/pics\/solder\/IMG_0436.JPG\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"130\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I might have been having some trouble getting the time I wanted in the demo for Mirror&#8217;s Edge, which if you haven&#8217;t already I suggest you check this game out. The end result is that a controller might have received the brunt of this frustration with the game. I have several broken controllers in my [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[78,135,176],"class_list":["post-268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-jo","tag-solder","tag-xbox-360-controller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.the500footbuddha.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.the500footbuddha.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.the500footbuddha.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.the500footbuddha.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.the500footbuddha.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.the500footbuddha.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.the500footbuddha.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.the500footbuddha.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.the500footbuddha.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}