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.

Thermal Printer recovery and repair

June 8, 2023October 17, 2015 by S-Config

Making a commercial-grade thermal printer work for your shipping and labeling needs.

This entry was started because for some reason throughout all of the years of repairing printers there hasn't really been a good article about thermal printer repair. Usually when you look-up problems with these types of printers you ether get sucked into trap sites that are trying to get your contact info. Forums that have a lot of dead links. Or some company that is only out to sell you a new thermal printer instead of fixing or even using the one that you already got. We're old-school Luddites and still believe the internet is a place for information. We will not sell you anything. If you find any of this information useful to you then awesome.

WEBM, OGV, and MP4 – WordPress video

July 2, 2024September 28, 2015 by S-Config

Encoding with WEBM, OGZ, and MP4 and wordpress title.

WebM and the things WordPress was hiding from me.

Originally, I was going to an article on just WebM and the advantages it gives me in WordPress. But as I looked at the logs on my server and WordPress still has a lot of work to do on their video insertion plugin.

Uninstall Cyanogen and restore Ouya Firmware.

July 2, 2024September 7, 2015 by S-Config

Uninstall Cyanogen from your Ouya.

Uninstall Cyanogen (sometimes referred to as CM11) and restore our Ouya back to factory default using the full firmware load in the ClockWorkMod Recovery menu. There can be many reasons why you would want to restore the factory firmware onto your Ouya ranging from the company actually getting off their ass and updating new software updates which make the Ouya usable once again such as an Android OS update. Simply restore stock because of the many bugs and glitches in Cyanogen that you simply cannot tolerate anymore. I have published a blog on how to install Cyanogen it is only fitting that I also publish a blog about how to remove Cyanogen as well.

Cyanogen Mod CM11 and the Ouya.

July 2, 2024August 24, 2015 by S-Config

Cyanogen mod the Ouya.

Why Cyanogen Mod (sometimes referred to as CM11) you ask? The future of Ouya and the news of the most recent acquisition of the company to Razer has made a lot of Ouya owners such as myself feel rather uneasy with the console business as a whole. Couple this with an aging OS to the point where some favorite applications such as Kodi no longer work under android 4.1 due to programming issues. Razer is now stating that they will keep the Ouya servers up for another year. But then what?

I guess they pull the plug and tell console owners such as myself to buy the next latest/greatest razer box. I will probably laugh and buy an Nvidia shield if I ever get an Android box again. But that's not the point of this blog entry.

previously

I-Pac controller rewired – v2

May 16, 2022July 16, 2015 by S-Config

I-Pac controller in a new case with cleaner wiring.

When I first started this blog I created a posting about how I could build a better controller for Stepmania by using a device called an I-Pac. In the MAME community the I-Pac does what modern day mechanical keyboards do by assigning each key its own interrupt onto a micro-controller giving you the absolute fastest response between your joystick and your PC. The only way you could go any faster then this device is by bypassing the USB bus all together and wiring your controller via GPIO onto something like a Raspberry Pi.

previously

Wireless Antenna mod for the Ouya

January 2, 2022March 26, 2015 by S-Config

Ouya Wireless Adapter Modification title

Installing a Wireless Antenna mod on your Ouya Console!

The Ouya while it does have a Wireless-N chip the quality of reception has a lot to be desired for it's wireless antenna. Consisting of a tiny block on the motherboard which behaves like a 3dbi antenna that one would expect on a Cel-Phone; The overall reception of wireless traffic coming into your Ouya especially at a distance is problematic. Initially, I did this mod in an attempt to alleviate Bluetooth lag on my Ouya joysticks as the chip-set that Ouya used carries both the Internet and Bluetooth traffic over the same wireless antenna. While it didn't help with the Joystick reception. It did help considerably with wireless traffic.

Png Optimization

November 1, 2019February 8, 2015 by S-Config

PNG and JPEG Optimization Title for Blog entries

It's time for Png Optimization yo!

For PNG Optimization: PNG (or Portable Network Graphics) was a replacement to GIF and is one of the most widely used lossless graphic formats on the net. Whenever you are setting up a website that has a heavy amount of images going for it; You often have to rely on other formats then JPEG or .jpg because although the .jpg is good for most cases such as photos it is often a self-destructive file to have as every time you re-compress the quality of the .jpg gets worse and worse. Also known as lossy compression where the image is compromised to better suit the compression of the file.

Transmission on Pi.

November 1, 2019December 22, 2014 by S-Config

Setting up Transmission on Pi.

Transmission is a torrent P2P file sharing software which is open source and can be run on practically every type of platform environment on the face of the earth. Since torrents can take a long time to download depending on how many seeders there are (people with complete copies of said file) versus peers or leechers (people who are attempting to receive files) it makes sense to keep a device on that only takes a few watts of power versus a giant PC which just eats power throughout the night.

China Xbox 360 receiver Raspberry Pi – xboxdrv

April 20, 2022October 4, 2014 by S-Config

Xbox Receiver on the Raspberry Pi or Banana Pi with xboxdrv

Raspberry / Banana Pi with xboxdrv

I got you covered on this as well with the help of xboxdrv! Although a little late to the party the Rasbian image initially did not have the xboxdrv library like Ubuntu users were so used to. As a result, Raspberry Pi users had to go through the headaches of compiling it themselves or simply find an alternative such as a genetic joystick or Bluetooth based joystick control provided they have a Bluetooth style receiver.

Note: This blog entry is a child blog off of the chinese xbox 360 receiver entry. If you stumbled upon this page first and have no idea what the hardware is be sure and check out that blog by clicking here.

There is no drag and drop style method for any version of Linux, you'll have to be typing some commands to get it working.

MiniDLNA Server and Raspberry Pi

November 1, 2019October 3, 2014 by S-Config

DNLA NAS server with the help of MiniDLNA for your Raspberry Pi.

MiniDLNA is another one of those articles where I had to go bouncing around between various sites to truly get all of the details about how to setup and maintain MiniDLNA properly. For those who do not know what it is. DLNA stands for "Digital Network Living Alliance" and it's a protocol used in many consoles, smartTV's even phones as a standardized protocol that they can all communicate on (depending on video and encoder). The Raspberry Pi is perfect for such a project as it's low power and can put out an 'okay' level of bandwidth can can handle most 720p videos and even some 1080p videos that are encoded well. This is also great if you want to have a constant library of music and pictures that you would like to share with your entire LAN for anyone in your house to view or play.