Guides

Guides, DIY, and How-to’s
Welcome to the guides section of our blog. This catagory is reserved for a lot of the technical things of what we love doing throughout our day to day existence. Some of these deal with some DIY projects we’ve done while others is just our own experience with certain pieces of hardware. Feel free to browse around as there may be something of interest to you.
Accuracy and update CRC.
As a kind note: Many of these guides are based around the personal experiences of those who run s-config.com and may not reflect the correct way of doing something. If you have any problems with what you are reading you can drop a comment in the article or contact us for any modifications or corrections.

Section 2: SSH and Samba on the Raspberry Pi.

June 27, 2024April 26, 2019 by S-Config

Using SAMBA and SSH on the Raspberry Pi Title.

Adding SSH and Samba onto the Raspberry Pi.

Now it's time to add SSH and Samba. For those who do not know what that is. SSH is a secure shell system that allows us to remote into our pi from any computer capable of loading an SSH client such as PuTTY onto their system. SSH can also be used for FTP transfers as a way of uploading files such as apk's and images to your Raspberry Pi so you can then access them via ADB to your Ouya. But instead of SSH-FTP, we're also going to load Samba which is a windows network sharing protocol allowing us seamless transfers from our PC or MAC over wireless to our Raspberry Pi.

Now, for those who are using the Raspberry Pi as a desktop or don't care to use it in a headless manner like we do having it hooked up in our living room to the Ouya. You can probably skip this tutorial altogether! However, for those who are using it as a headless unit then read on as we provide all of the instructions down below.

Section 1: Preparing the Raspberry Pi for ADB and Ouya Action

June 27, 2024April 25, 2019 by S-Config

Let's begin with preparing our Raspberry Pi.

This blog is just one part of a multipart series on how to use the Raspberry Pi with the Ouya. It is designed this way because frankly there is way too much to cover in a single blog. Links for each of the articles as well as the header/main article will be included at the bottom of each entry to allow users ease of use in following along.

Read on if you want to know more.

Serial Servers over Ethernet – Virtual COM port mapping

June 17, 2024March 10, 2019 by S-Config

Serial over Ethernet?

This article is going to go into the world of old-school and obscure. That was before we had the internet. Before we even had such a thing as an RJ-45 jack to network with. There were only two cost-effective ways of transferring data from one device to another during the '80s and most of the '90s. Parallel and Serial transfers. This allowed computers to make a very primitive 'network' of sorts by pairing multiple serial connectors together to effectively talk to a program such as a BBS (Bulletin Board System).

With the introduction of USB, the need for these types of adapters is greatly reduced over the years. The requirement of a serial port still arises from time to time whenever you are doing with older CNC Machinery, Thermal Printers, Solar power monitoring stations, Industrial PLCs, and most importantly to us hooking up to old machines like Commodores and Amigas to do file transfers. Maybe you want to hook your high-speed network up to a 56k modem so you can re-live the days of dial-up?

It seems a little masochistic to us but some people dig the whole "Nostalgia" theme. There you go! In this day and age where you can convert anything to anything, there surely must be an effective means of virtualization serial over Ethernet right?

Let's find out!

Ambient RGB LED Lighting.

October 30, 2019February 2, 2019 by S-Config

DIY fun with LED RGB Lighting.

LED RGB Lighting is almost like some project you put on Pinterest. But it's going here because we make it! Screw image aggregate services that seek to control the internet. We wanted something in the living room for those nights where we want to relive music videos of girls putting up lipstick while a guy in a gimp suit dances in front of us. We're both the ones with the makeup AND inside of the suit at the same time! More accurately in those music videos, they use 3-point lighting. Blue, Red, and a Natural white.

This latest blog entry deals with me getting all "basic-boi" and the simple fact that we didn't want to go out and buy a 100+ US dollar Phillips RGB LED mood-light bulb for my living room. Probably also because we would have to be anywhere from two to four of them to which we're sorry. Not paying $300+ for lights that just "set the mood." Especially when I have a lot of the materials to make the lighting, to begin with. So let's see if we can show you to the best of our abilities how to do this. Read on if you want to know more.

Corsair Void Pro – Disassembly and Repair.

March 25, 2023September 15, 2018 by S-Config

A Corsair Void Pro has now landed on my workbench.

We recently had a friend bring to me a Corsair Void Pro headset. That during their travels through airports, the headset sustained some damage that rendered it inoperable. Although this is a simple repair. It's still informative to those who don't want to see it on YouTube dealing with "shakey-cam" footage on the repair process of these headsets. On top of it since we've already gone off about other corsair products such as the M65 and their Scimitar. Why not start on their headset line?

Open up and put it in! Let us begin!

Read more

DIY mouse feet.

June 5, 2023August 10, 2018 by S-Config

Mouse feet and where to find them.

We did an article about repairing the Corsair Scimitar mouse but there was one thing that we forgot to cover upon rebuilding that mouse which is the mouse feet. Otherwise known as mouse skids or even mouse skates. But mouse feet from most manufacturers are made from 0.6mm of a substance known as PTFE (Polytetrafluoroethylene or in America, it can also go by its copy-written name "Teflon".) Then, a layer of VHB (very high bond) double-sided tape is applied to the bottom. The Teflon is probably sodium treated so that the VHB can bind to the back without peeling away immediately due to its natural properties. But we won't get into the chemical science of it all because we just want to get our mouse feet restored!

Would you like to know more?

Building a Raspberry Pi 3 Case from Acrylic/Polycarbon

June 5, 2023August 7, 2018 by S-Config

We tried to be professional about it making our own raspberry Pi Case. But that's lame. So you get to see us screw up and still win!

This is going to be more of a document and guide of our trials and errors in how we designed our Raspberry Pi 3 case. We did learn a lot about the general manufacturing process of trying to get one done professionally and even though we failed in some respects we are at least able to provide you better instructions than just making something, in theory, crossing our fingers and hoping for the best.

Corsair Scimitar RGB Pro gaming mouse – Disassembly and repair.

July 28, 2024May 14, 2018 by S-Config

The Scimitar! Yet-Another Corsair mouse repair blog!

It's repair and disassembly of the Corsair Scimitar Gaming Mouse! We know we've been doing a lot of these types of blogs. For those who read the M65 repair and are back for more. Thanks! We do appreciate your readership! This guide is going to cover the problem along with a quick tear-down and rebuild of the mouse.

Corsair M65 Pro RGB gaming mouse – Disassembly and repair.

July 28, 2024April 22, 2018 by S-Config

A Corsair M65 has now ended up on the repair bench. It is ours. Crap!

So the Corsair M65 mouse we use on one of our primary PCs is failing after only a year of operation. Honestly, we didn't expect it to fail so soon! Partially because whenever a person purchases gaming hardware for everyday office and blogging activities such as what we do. Under less stressful environments the mouse should last a long time! Perhaps it's also prior to this mouse we installed a Microsoft IntelliMouse for almost 15 years(blog article here). We thought that the corsair should last at LEAST that long. We should also note that during the entire year of operation with this mouse no known abuse has happened to this unit. No liquids or extreme physical abuse such as any long-term gaming. Read on for more!

Xbox 360 Controller Emulator (x360ce) for PC gaming.

June 20, 2024February 3, 2018 by S-Config

A quick review on a cool software known as x360ce.

The x360ce (Xbox 360 Controller Emulator) may not need any introduction to many in the gaming community. But we feel it should deserve a noteworthy review and basics as to the hows and why that this software exists. The reason why this software is handy and at times almost essential to play certain games is due to the way they are programmed.