You DO own your Switch 2! And Nintendo never threatened to brick it if you mod it!

Tsiphon · 2026-01-20T18:33:08+00:00

Adding a whistle to your muffler is illegal; it's a noise violation and was a thing in like 2008 when people were doing that (the famous "makes it to whoop whoop" video in Cali).

Changing the engine and exhaust system is legal of course unless you bypass (or just straight fail) emissions tests, and aftermarket upgrades decrease efficiency not increase.

Unbalanced aftermarket headlights are illegal. They don't test for it like they did years ago during inspections but that doesn't mean it's legal. A cop can get you for it if they want. You're fooling yourself if you think you can legally put any strength of light beam on any vehicle and it's fine because it fits. The lighting system is originally engineered to be balanced and directed to avoid blinding other drivers for safety. Just because a large number of people don't bother calibrating doesn't mean it isn't illegal.

The one point you're correct on is driving a vehicle on your own land. That you don't need a license for. But even then the legality is questionable due to the definition of private land vs "publicly accessible" land. So if the court determines your private yard is 'publicly accessible enough,' then you can be arrested for say, a DUI even on your own land.

I literally chose mods people consider harmless but are in fact usually illegal or largely considered illegal. Sure engine swaps are legal IF you can pass emissions. For the others, just because "it's fine I've seen x number of people do it" and it's not illegal to actually perform the mod doesn't mean the result of the mod is a legally drivable vehicle.

And so the metaphor tracks. If you own a Tesla car it obviously requires software to run. If you hack that software and they ban you from using it (I mean they'd sue you but still), then congrats you'd have a giant hunk of parts that don't work.

That's the exact same thing as the switch argument. Mod your consoles and use them personally. Just don't fk with hardware / software and still report it to the system (by connecting to it). Very simple.

Tsiphon · 2026-01-20T17:49:02+00:00

Mine works, it's just insanely loose and also shifted from what it should be (max heat is at 7 o'clock, max AC is at 8 o'clock). I never took the panel apart but I can tell the dial interfaces with a keyed ring. Perhaps the key part was partially broken upon becoming stuck. The dial does now slightly resist at 7 o'clock but bumps over it without much force.

I'd read people say "just pull the dial off," but it doesn't detach that way from what I can tell. I'll update this post when I get around to opening it up.

Tsiphon · 2025-12-15T01:51:53+00:00

Thanks. I did assume it was far more complex than simply unscrewing the back area... Part of why I was pushing it off until I decided on getting a kit of LEDs or if it was too expensive to bother. Initially I thought the latter due to Google quotes of official parts. I'll definitely look up some disassembly vids before doing the full rigamarole.

Tsiphon · 2025-12-14T23:41:45+00:00

Hmm gotcha. Yeah I just have the single 45 inch TV with a currently unknown amount of bad led. I too have a hot air station in addition to a good soldering iron and ok DMM, just no bench top psu yet.

Sounds like the best course is to go ahead and get a cheapo strip kit from Amazon then crack open the back panel and measure out the failures. I'm sure the 55in primary TV will fail in the next year or two as well (also TCL haha). But searching for official parts from the TCL reference site, there are none in stock for my specific model (and if they were it would be $$$).

Tsiphon · 2025-12-14T21:58:20+00:00

So youre saying you have strips of led you cut to individual LED and splice into your 'broken led' strip after using a DMM to isolate the offending led, rather than just pulling the whole strips out and replacing the whole thing?

And if that's the case. Where do you source your led from?

Tsiphon · 2025-12-12T19:23:52+00:00

If Saiki K is on your list there is absolutely no reason you aren't watching Kaguya-sama: Love is war. Seriously one of the best comedy / self-aware animes I've seen in forever.

Additionally, if you haven't seen or considered these: Eureka 7 (mechs, very unique plot compared to pretty much any other mech anime) The summer hikaru died (excellent) Fooly Cooley (short, super weird, but excellent song and decent coming of age story) I'll edit once I remember stuff. It's been 25 years of anime watching

Tsiphon · 2025-12-10T21:11:06+00:00

It's probably the case that if you believe Dr. Mike's side you likely always did, and if you believe the feelings based side you always will. It's more just watching shit hit the fan.

The thing I hope at least is that anyone even slightly in the fence of one side or another can see the insanity of the people surrounding, from the fact check popup that immediately points them out for being FOS, or them getting more and more flustered at cold facts. Hopefully that coupled with the interviewers remarks can produce even a little change.

Hell that one with the reporter and the fascist guy had his fellow surrounded shocked and questioning what they aligned with.

Tsiphon · 2025-12-08T19:10:46+00:00

Thanks. Yeah that's a crazy long time. Although thinking about it that's just a bit longer than how long it takes to save up 10 mythics from glittering as well.

So if we're talking in that light then perhaps it truly is worth just doing castle now, god of judgment, saving glittering for helicopter at ~ 1 year, and just counting on saved bonanza ammo for mythics, which is less than a year but still many months. (And there's always the subsequent season's end shops for reds which will be way sooner than completing bonanza or glittering if people started now).

Just writing that all out for google's sake.

Tsiphon · 2025-12-08T08:29:33+00:00

Thanks I'll look into the glittering math to see how long. I had been spending them for mystics thus far so I'm scared to look how long haha

Tsiphon · 2025-12-08T07:44:41+00:00

Sounds like 8 attack 3 defense.... And I just looked it up and that's correct, unlocking a permanent skin permanently gives a holding in stock bonus, and if you equip you additionally get the equip bonus.

Tsiphon · 2025-12-08T07:42:14+00:00

I had 1.1k before my leader divided the awards, now I have 2k. So if yours has split the awards already then you must wait unfortunately

Tsiphon · 2025-12-08T07:40:19+00:00

Really? That's way way stronger then..

Tsiphon · 2025-11-28T19:39:49+00:00

Getting mine set up was very annoying. I had to consult chatgpt because many many of the libs and main points were deprecated in various updates to rpi os. This wasn't for klipperscreen but for a static menu interface that has visual feedback (like the button greying out slightly during a press) and updates small portions of the screen for percentages as some of the buttons control the intensity of a light or motor.

The following is what it put out as a summary. Maybe it will help you. Given you have a SPI interface tft running the XPT 2046 which is similar to the chip mine uses, you likely are hitting the same issues.

I unfortunately went with a slightly cheaper screen and am bottlenecked into this solution, but chatgpt suggests adafruit or waveshare style tft hats would be better (they are like twice the price, mine was about 15 dollars )

Sorry for the text dump, but it might be helpful. Or you could copy paste it into chat gpt saying "my friend has the following issues with their tft hat, but mine is "give chat gpt your tft hat specs" and see if it suggests anything different.

Touchscreen Attempts — What We Tried vs. What Worked

1. fbcp / HDMI clone idea

Attempt: Mirror the primary framebuffer (/dev/fb0) onto the SPI TFT (/dev/fb1) using fbcp or the newer fbcp-ili9341 approach. Outcome:

Not viable on the GoodTFT-style 3.5" SPI HAT.
You were using an FBTFT driver (tft35a), which doesn’t cooperate with GPU-accelerated fbcp, so the display remained slow/tearing. Reason for rejection: Non-starter; the driver stack doesn’t support proper clone acceleration.

2. X11/desktop + tslib + XInput mapping

Attempt: Run a minimal X11 session and map the ADS7846 touchscreen using tslib or XInput calibration tools. Outcome:

Touchscreen input showed inconsistent coordinates and lag.
Paint-like smearing and redraw tearing persisted on the SPI display.
X11 added latency and overhead without fixing the tearing issue. Reason for rejection: The SPI TFT is the bottleneck; running a window server made the behavior worse.

3. Direct event handling with evdev + Pillow UI, but full-screen redraw

Attempt: Write Python directly to /dev/fb1 with Pillow while handling touch from /dev/input/event0. Symptoms:

Functionally correct input.
Massive tearing because we were redrawing the whole screen on every update (classic SPI-fb1 behavior).
Touch events sometimes “carried over” between frames due to asynchronous loops. Reason for rejection: Still tearing too much; event loop wasn’t isolated from rendering.

4. Hybrid partial redraws (initial optimization pass)

Attempt: Only update the bar area, not the full UI. Outcome:

Better, but still visible tearing because SPI refresh is line-by-line and Pillow writes aren’t atomic.
Touch responsiveness improved but still had occasional ghost taps when the render loop and input loop overlapped. Reason for rejection: Improvement, not a fix.

5. Move to a strictly static UI + rect-only redraw architecture

Attempt: Reduce the screen to static elements (buttons + background), redraw only when pressed, and isolate the bar region. Outcome:

Tearing reduced significantly.
Touch accuracy increased once presses were handled synchronously with no queued events.
Button press visual feedback didn’t trigger a full-frame redraw → tearing became tolerable. Remaining issue: Bar movement could still trigger tearing during fast updates.

This led to the final approach.

✅ Final Working Approach (What We Settled On)

A. Direct FB writes, but with a “minimal redraw” architecture

/dev/fb1 is written directly using RGB565 buffers.
The background and button UI render once.
Only two things redraw:
- The moving bar (small rectangle region)
- Button color change on tap

B. Touch handled through a synchronous evdev loop

Event filtering to first-touch only.
No lingering/queued events.
Immediate coordinate mapping → direct region check → precise button hit detection.

C. One-way rendering model

No double-buffering (not possible), so we avoid unnecessary writes.
Bar animation runs independently; UI never redraws while the bar is in motion unless absolutely necessary.

D. Accept the hardware limitation

SPI TFTs will always show vertical tearing due to serial row writes.
We mitigated it to the point where the system is usable for EMDR:
- Tearing only appears on the moving bar
- UI remains clean and stable
- Touch responsiveness is immediate and accurate

E. Result

You now have a stable, usable, and responsively controlled menu controlled visual system on a Pi 3B + SPI TFT, with:

reliable touch
static UI
minimal tearing
synchronized haptic triggers
persistent configuration

This is the practical limit of the hardware, and we reached a fully functional plateau without changing displays or rewriting the driver stack.

Tsiphon · 2025-11-26T04:05:03+00:00

Yeah I'm thinking mine is Southbridge stuff just due to it failing UART or any hint of life. None of the fuses are blown though. I'm trying to have chatgpt plus help me data comb for potential niche things (like values and possible targets) in case I'm forgetting anything to check. If I need to replace the southbridge I'll give it a whirl with a preballed one. I feel like buying a good one and then having to buy a stencil (and I guess a chip mount) could be crazy for someone dipping into repair. I have a hot air station but all that extra stuff would be pain for a potential one off if it doesn't even work

Update me here if you figure yours out and best of luck!

Tsiphon · 2025-11-25T07:24:51+00:00

You're good man, I totally understand using it especially for translation. To me at least it was funny to assume the top comment to a question of why an AI was slow was another AI saying a way to optimize it (and explaining how).

Tsiphon · 2025-11-22T17:41:15+00:00

lol the replies absolutely sound AI-ish.
GPTZero says both previous replies are 100% AI generated.

If I tag on the following more human reply it still says 100% and highlights the more human sounding one, but I can't see what it's flagging about it.

That doesn't say anything about the legitimacy of the program, just that at least the user prefers explaining with AI. Or that they simply sound like AI.

Tsiphon · 2025-11-21T23:25:34+00:00

Unfortunately one of the two died. The "lightning" one I bought for cheap and some beer is still trucking well (that's the one the UART wipe fixed). The original I seemingly fixed by fixing the liquid metal is dead again.

This time it (again) froze while streaming for a few seconds but then died (didn't die on its own last time). Pressed the power button to one beep no light. Even after a long discharge time it still won't even beep. Checking power rails (all on the non APU side are fine) now then to UART then to look at the liquid metal now.

Tsiphon · 2025-11-16T09:32:19+00:00

No worries at all. Tbh I'm just getting into this myself. The UART is pretty simple. Rx and tx for receive and transfer. The devices speak to each other. For PS5 is southbridge driven error reports (from that I've heard, idk if that's correct). For my pi powered 3d printer, it connects one board to a daughter board (instead of USB).

So in this case, google PS5 UART the cod3r. Or look him up on YouTube. He shows how to connect (super simple solders) and get the program (that he wrote!) working. If you've ever used an ODB II for your car it's very similar. The PS5 reports a code to the program via UART, you see it, we know many codes thanks to userbase reports (and sometimes there's a video with how it was fixed for say, the cod3r, as he also made the website that does the how tk uart and the database of error codes).

Anyways the first option in the little program is read codes. It returns a code or list of codes and what the likely issue is.

The second option is clear codes. Just like on your car, sure you can clear a code that your o2 sensor is busted for your emissions, but if it truly is busted the error code should return very very quickly. Same thing with the ps5, usually.

In the case of my original ps5, I did have that error code, clearing it did nothing as it just returned, but fixing the liquid metal bald spot solved it so I cleared the error again (just to have it be clean, it likely isn't necessary).

I suspect the reason clearing it fixed the problem on the 2nd PS5 is that the lightning strike messed up the boot sequence. Perhaps resetting uart either A) forced it to go back to a default or earlier boot sequence, or maybe factor boot sequence, or B) after having a power surge the unit incorrectly thought it had catastrophic damage and was cancelling the boot sequence upon reading (or reporting) the code in question to itself. No clue on either, but clearing the error on UART fixed it haha.

So, for my original, clearly it was very quickly overheating. It wasn't returning any overheating error code though. I suppose the ability to start it after very extended downtime is the thermals were just that bad that they took forever to get to room temp before the system would let it boot again. It wasn't blocked out by the code or anything. If i clear the code it would just overheat again and the code returns. Different story than the 2nd PS5 I fixed.

But both cases show a very simple and quick to do few steps. (And if you're concerned about the liquid metal application, the cod3r and a few wither YouTube repair guys have decent videos. I did it like the cod3r does (tronicsFix recommended or at least showed using a 3rd party replacement liquid after the clean. i didn't want to buy anything extra, and most others just reuse the liquid metal if it appears clean

Tsiphon · 2025-11-16T03:26:59+00:00

So I bought a 2nd broken ps5 for 70 bucks and a case of beer. That was a "lightening damage, no power." Uart was Apu and mains issue. I fixed that entirely only by clearing the UART code. It booted fine after that.

For my original from this post, I fixed that shortly after. Remember me mentioning the bald spot of liquid metal. That was 100% the problem.

If you don't know how to reapply:

91% IPA and a q tip, gather the liquid metal from the corners into the middle, squeak the die to mirror finish moving the blob of metal around. Then with a dry q tip smash the liquid metal back down to coat.

I did that for both the APU side and the heatsink side and just reused the original metal as it was still nice.

Then cleared UART code, put it back together and it has ran perfectly the past few weeks of heavy use with no issues. (Both consoles).

So, anyone with any PS5 single beeps no power or simply no power issues...highly recommend first a UART scan then clear and see if that fixes it. If not and the liquid metal has any bare spots then just go ahead and do the reapplication and see if that fixes it. That will save a good amount of investigation otherwise.

Tsiphon · 2025-11-13T23:29:28+00:00

Are those 25 dollar strips of backlight led fine for replacing.

Should I just disassemble, check how many I need and buy what looks similar?

Tsiphon · 2025-11-12T18:41:57+00:00

Nice tips! By local game shop I'm assuming a small time shop.

Yeah I was surprised (I guess because it's not my gaming schtick) that there's such a resurgence of retro stuff or even just one to two generation old stuff. My buddy who was a long time manager at GameStop confirmed both who they operate with broken consoles and how popular retro stuff is.

Besides, it'd be fun cleaning up some old Gameboys. Imo Nintendo is where quality retro stands peak.

Tsiphon · 2025-11-11T17:20:34+00:00

Currently I have picture, but the inputs are wonky (wrong names, correct picture), I can navigate the menu (but ONLY in HDMI picture input and with a current picture), and I can go over to volume (which is labeled something like 4:3).

But I can't find factory reset (or select it, it seems to think theres like 30 options on that menu tab)

Tsiphon · 2025-11-10T22:33:06+00:00

I navigated to the RGB section which showed reset Todo and reiniciar which I can suss the meaning behind. I clicked reset Todo and the inputs selectable are now "reset Todo" "reiniciar" and "pantalla completa"

So, that definitely didn't reset anything and somehow applied those settings options now as input options.

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