That moment when your gaming gear breaks

[Deleted]

The moment of grief
I assume you know the feeling, the feeling of despair mixed with sadness. You still remember, every single one of them, of which you are no longer are able to use. Me? Yea I had my fair share of gaming equipment that I no longer were able to use.

The most beloved gear
Most notably was my $1700 MSI gaming laptop, of which my entire life was centered around, for World of Warcraft raiding, Linkin Park music, and Lord of the rings movies. In spite of my lack of interest in partying, my friend convinced me go to his place, bring my laptop and go party.. I woke up, swimming in puke.. so was my laptop.. needless to say, I spend weeks cleaning and trying to get it to work. Now, I am no engineer, I have no clue about hardware and electronics. But when your life depends on it, you can become anything you want. While after a week of tweaking, I managed to get it to start up once, load the windows and be able to use it fully, once I turned it off to attach the rest of the PC, it never woke up again.

That one little thing..
That was the moment when I realized, that it is always one simple little thing, one little tweak that can mean the difference between something that works, and something that doesn’t. Heck, you can buy another (I had to survive with library computers and smartphone until I could afford a proper laptop again), but when my Razer Diamondback mouse broke, they already stopped producing these. One day, I plugged it in, and I heard a spark, and ever since, I have never had the same joy with any other mouse.

What can we do?
After multiple laptops, mouses, headsets, mobiles and other electronics that we are becoming increasingly dependent on that stopped working, I sat down together with one of my friends who is an engineer, Tom Wang (He is more of a Starcraft 2 guy), and we thought about what could solve this problem.

Digging deeper
Fun fact, all of our electronics that we use run on electricity. To figure out what is wrong with your devices when it stops working, you need to know whether circuits are connected, if the right part has the right amount of electricity or resistance (again, I have no clue about this) and so on. While I previously used a hammer, a screwdriver and scotch tape and other nifty tools, I realized to actually be able to do anything to get my gear back up, I need to be able to measure electricity = I need to use a multimeter.

Getting scary
Now, a multimeter for me is a horrible memory of physics classes back in primary School (I am at university level now, but in Denmark we have Business High School, so we can skip subjects like Physics). They have tons of settings, and apparently if you pick the wrong one, it can explode (or so I heard). For me they are scary, and complicated and I have no idea of how to use it. I just want to be able to know what is wrong with my devices. Now, even if I do learn to use the meter, I have no clue what to do with the number I get.

Lets make something better
So the last 2 years, together with some friends, we came up with a simple idea. What if you could turn your smartphone into a multimeter, and have all the guidance at the tip of your finger, so noobs like me can solve our problems without reading 5 years of electrical engineering. We went to get experts on our team to help us make it (for example, we got a guy who works at Intel to help out during weekends)

atleast its something
Now we have a working hardware prototype + software prototype of the solution, and my nice friends already made it so I can see if my battery for my wireless mouse is dead, half or full (because sometimes it is not the battery, but my mouse that acts up). We launched a kickstarter campaign, as it is apparently also useful for more than just gamers. It seems that professional people also can use it.

Link to our solution: kickstarter . com/projects/tomwang/voltset-worlds-smartest-multimeter-for-smart-devic

We are still working to make it better, and eventually I hope that this could be the “savior of gamer gadgets” - What do you think? What have your experiences of broken electronics been?

[Deleted]

Tom Wang? Ouch

"Fun fact, all of our electronics that we use run on electricity." Really? xD

So, with multimeter, we can confirm if some electronic device is dead by first disassembling the casing and voiding any warranties? Average dude without any experience or training isn't going to be able to diagnose and repair circuits even if he has all the tools for it. Not even mentioning that modern electronics are extremely tiny and require very steady hand and sophisticated equipment to do soldering.

Sorry for picking on you.

[Cyberowl]

Well, if my gears breaks it is because I accidentally kick it against a hard wall when standing up by pulling the cable out of my pc... thanks god wireless headsets were invented.

While your project may be nice, I don't think this sort of topics are tolerated on mmoc, since you kinda promote and advertise your kickstarter campaign...good luck nevertheless!

[chazus]

We do not allow advertising on the forum. Closing this thread. This is not a story, it's a kickstarter ad.