Fix a broken Gold Card Reader

So my gold card finally packed in over the weekend. I'm not sure if anyone has ever tried to fix one before (probably) but I just had a shot and succeeded. For those who are interested this is what they look like inside. They are powered by 2 CR2016 panasonic 3V batteries. Of note is that the batteries were fine. Still registering 3.3V ish so I can't see them running out any decade soon. The fix then turned out to be mechanical. Inside there are 6 contacts for the card reading which touch the 6 contacts on the top end of the card (i.e. towards the Entropia writing). There is also an additional "contact" towards the back (see arrow) this is actually a pressure switch that connects with a contact below whenever you push your card fully in, this activates the reader. I believe that this had (through wear and tear) got stuck down in the permanent "on" position. The fix was to get my nail under it and lever it up ever so slightly. I suspect the reader contains some sort of automatic "timeout" feature so that if you leave your card in there, it doesn't drain the battery to nothing. My guess is that it had done this so the reader was stuck in permanent "off" mode.

Anyhow, that fix saved a lot of hassle in sending it away and waiting for MA to send me a new one. I hear rumour they are rather slow at that. Here are some pics of the inside.

Wist

 

I was wondering about doing something like this... it might be possible to do 2 things. One, for min effort, have something that automatically talks to the card via hacking the reader and spits a number straight into the Entropia client during login or two, rig the reader up to some sort of back to the future delorian style 6 character LED 7 segment display that sits above your monitor or something.

That would be a fun mod but I admit, rather pointless.

One of the things I really like about the reader is the way it shunts the numbers out one at a time. That was a funky design decision.

Wistrel

PS I didn't know the login app was out already. Interesting that 50-100 people did... I don't want to use an app though. I have a gold card. I wonder how long it will be till someone decompilies it... in fact did anyone ever do that with that other entropia app that lets you login?

 

Well there was that guy on here who said "the hackers are watching entropia" or some such shit. Well who knows.

 

ahhh whaaaaaat...? lame!

 

Just repaired mine again... Well so the fix lasted 4.5 years of fairly infrequent use... not too bad. Now if only MA could maintain my connection....

 

I'm still using mine. Maybe they like me... shrug

 

I suppose I should say that mine is still going strong and I'll keep it going as long as humanly possible! (Hopefully until Untropia at the current rate things are going - I'm [sadly] not under any delusions they'll port the code over to Untropia to support the gold cards]). Maybe they'd accept some players offering to do it for free... (unlikely)

Wistrel