The contact between mobile phone (an old Sony Ericsson if it matters, but I don’t think it does) and its adapter has a VERY patchy connection that you have to fidget and fidget with until it makes contact and then back away carefully like you just disarmed a bomb and then DON’T TOUCH IT OR THE WIRE. Then it recharges and all is well. This condition, predictably, has slowly gotten worse.
Then I remembered the old trick we used for patchy Nintendo cartridges. And here I mean the gray box. Plain old NES. It really did seem to help (or more accurately, work like magic) to breathe hot air into the cartridge immediately before inserting it into that garage door slot.
So I tried it on my phone (breathing hot air on the plug itself and inside the phone) and lo and behold- it works like a charm!
I googled around and found a site that actually advised AGAINST this, saying that condensation could get trapped inside devices and cause rust and general deterioration. Makes sense. Yet it works like a charm for me. Every time. Just like it did with the NES. And nothing in the way of explanation of how this works.
So what gives? How does this work? I’m thinking that it’s the condensation adding a layer of moisture which narrows the gap for the connection or something similar. But I’m saying condensation. My boyfriend says he thinks it could be the heat, warming up the contacts is what’s helping.
So finally on to my questions- first-
This IS a real phenomenon, right? I’m not the only one, I know, with NES cartridges.
And second-
Who’s right? Is it condensation or heat? Or something else altogether we’re overlooking?
Thanks!
I would assume the moisture from your breath helps in the short term by creating a path for the flow of electricity from one contact to the other, but in the long term would cause corrosion which would make the contact even worse. Try cleaning the contacts with an eraser.
Yes, then blow away any residue with compressed air or a clean, lint free cloth. I don’t know anything about ‘Deoxit’. Problem contacts aren’t necessarily corroded to any great degree. Sometimes ‘crud’ just builds up on them. But an eraser will remove light corrosion also. Try to use a fairly fresh eraser. Sometimes old ones are dry and crumble easily, requiring more cleanup.
One word of caution - don’t use a pen eraser. Those have abrasives which will actually damage the contacts. Back in the late 70’s when I serviced minicomputers, management decreed that erasers were verboten (because of the previously-mentioned abrasion, and because techs who weren’t careful left pieces of eraser behind*). They issued each of us a kit of Texwipe “Gold-wipes” which were a specially-designed contact cleaning cloth. We already had the plain alcohol wipes, used to clean the heads in disk drives (how’s that for nostalgia?). When we ran out of Gold-wipes we went back to using erasers - this was either just another management fad** or they used up all their free samples.
That was the stated reason. I suspect it was actually because the customers saw us using erasers and thought they could save the cost of a service call by doing it themselves.
** Another brilliant idea by management was to have us fill out paperwork with numeric codes for the problem and resolution, so they could have their overpaid consultants analyze the data and tell them how they could save money. So we got these “pocket bibles” with all of the numeric codes and were expected to look up the code for every operation we performed. As an example, the codes looked like this:
Action Object
00 No action 00 No problem found
01 Adjusted 01 Contacts
02 Lubricated 02 Fuse
03 Replaced 03 Connector
[...]
So, if there was a bad fuse, we were supposed to enter “03-02” for “Replaced fuse”.
A bunch of us felt this was stupid - we’d spend more time looking up codes than actually fixing the customer’s computer. So we all started entering a code which translated to “Lubricated Customer”. That went on for about 6 months, until the consultants came back with their report that said the company could save the most money by pre-lubricating the customers. Which was probably true…
Note that the NES thing was all… hot air. It had nothing to do with blowing in the cartridge. The failure came about due to worn out contacts inside the NES box that no longer sprung back out as intended . I fixed my original NES by opening it up and prying all the contacts back out with a needle. I fixed another NES that I bought later in life by ordering a replacement bus (with fresh, springy contacts) and installing it.
Blowing in the cartridge served only to force you to pull it out and then re-seat it, possibly getting luckier the second time.
When doing mainframe software programming many years ago, management came up with similar very detailed timelogs we were supposed to fill out for every project we worked on. We insisted that they add a category for “time spent filling out timelogs”. Then we charged the actual amount of time we spent filling out the forms to that category.
Within a few months, the timelogs became much simpler – especially after a quarterly managers meeting, where a list was distributed ranking each manager by the amount of time his staff had spent on such ‘overhead’ categories vs. chargeable project time.
I distinctly remember trying in desperation to play Metroid, inserting, removing, reinserting, probably 20+ times (I was addicted to Metroid) and then a friend suggested the hot air thing, and it immediately worked. Metroid would systematically fail and fail again and again (I could hardly believe my breath was what was doing it, so I gave it many chances without the breath thing as a sloppy test), and always loaded after the hot air thing.
Make of that what you will. It COULD have been a coincidence of course, each time.
There is something particular that happens where objects touch one another. You can think of it as a point contact, the spots on the microscopically rough surfaces that actually do contact, and there is a very fine space surrounding that contact. Like the crevice that asymptotically vanishes away to nothing between two perfect spheres in contact. If the two things were already touching, and if the substances had a critical surface tension higher than around 70 millinewtons per meter, there should be some water in that gap. The edge of this ring of water would be a concave surface, and its radius of curvature would be related to the relative humidity by the Kelvin effect. You see, relative humidity isn’t the fraction of humidity relative to the maximum possible, it’s the fraction relative to equilibrium humidity for a flat water-air interface. Convex water surfaces equilibrate with an RH over 100%, and concave surfaces equilibrate with an RH under 100%. This is part of how sorbents take water out of the air; it condenses in their pores. At least, this is how it works when there’s more than a monolayer on the sorbent.
I think you are altering the available water in the area by breathing on it. So, the water ring establishes itself just after you plug things together, much as it would have if the things had already been in contact when you breathed on them.
