Fixing Ghost Touch In The OnePlus One

November 24, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

The OnePlus One is the flagship phone killer for 2014, available only by invite, and thus extremely cool. So far it’s a limited production run and there will, of course, be problems with the first few thousand units. When [vantt1] got his One, he noticed a few issues with the touch screen. Some touches wouldn’t be registered, typing was unpredictable, and generally, the touchscreen was unusable. [vantt] had seen this before, though, so with a complete teardown and a quick fix he was able to turn this phone into something great.

[vantt] realized the symptoms of a crappy touchscreen were extremely similar to an iPad mini that had recently had its digitizer replace. From the Foxconn plant, the digitizer in the iPad mini is well insulated from the aluminium enclosure. When the screen and digitizer are replaced, the cable connecting it to the rest of the iPad can come in contact with the case. This leads to the same symptoms – missed touches, and unpredictable typing.

Figuring the same cure will fix the same symptoms, [vantt] tore apart his OnePlus One and carefully taped off the digitizer flex cable. Reassembling the phone, everything worked beautifully, and without any extra screws in the reassembly process. You can’t do better than that.

MSP430 Touchscreen Piano

May 5, 2013 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

msp430-touchscreen-piano

[Rohit Gupta] wrote in to share this touchscreen piano project he built around the TI Launchpad. It provided a way for him to explore using a resistive digitizer found on a lot of mobile devices. These are simply stuck to the top of LCD screens and replacements are inexpensive, but salvaging one from old hardware is an option as well.

The first thing he did was to test the four outputs of the digitizer with his multimeter. Logging the changing resistance will help make sure you’re reading the correct wires and are able to zero in the settings before you start coding. [Rohit] uses the ADC on the MSP430 chip to read from the screen. He went with the algorithm from one of TI’s app notes to convert the readings in to X and Y coordinates.

He separated the screen into seven columns, each generating a different tone. Touching higher or lower on that column will alter the pitch of the note produced. You can hear an example of this in the demo after the jump.

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Dell Streak Screen Repair Yields A Few Welcome Surprises

March 4, 2012 by Mike Nathan 23 Comments

dell-streak

[Rupert’s] friend cracked the screen on his beloved Dell Streak 5 phone and handed it off to see if [Rupert] could repair it. He says that the glass replacement was a relatively straightforward affair – a process he documented in thorough detail worthy of iFixit.

He did come across a few interesting tidbits along the way, including an Atmel Mega168P hanging out on the broken screen’s digitizer board, which now resides in his parts bin. The most intriguing thing [Rupert] discovered however was that the phone’s on-board memory chip wasn’t soldered in as he would have expected. Instead, he found a standard microSD slot with a 2GB card in tow. He didn’t happen to have a larger card on hand, but after researching a bit he did find out that swapping the card is a relatively simple process.

If you happen to have one of these phones sitting around, or come across a damaged unit at any point, it definitely seems worth it to resurrect it and change the factory card out for something along the lines of a 32GB model. We certainly wouldn’t complain if we had a rooted 32GB Streak kicking around!