Disabling busted L & R shoulder buttons


gamelaw

Still Fresh
Joined
Oct 29, 2010
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Now that I've learned the hard way that a state-of-the-art, hand-made, electronics device can easily be damaged I need some help from the community.  The Left & Right shoulder buttons have taken the largest impacts and have been jammed downward to point of no longer springing back up - which is affecting boot and moue/cursor movement.  I could send it in for repair.  I could open it up and try to muck around with it myself.  But since I actually rarely use the Pandora for gaming (shocking!) I really just want to disable the shoulder buttons - I never use them for anything anyway.

Since I SSH into the device easily, can someone give me a set console commands that should disable the L & R shoulder buttons?  I'd love to disable them before boot to avoid the boot menu, but as a fallback I'd take commands to disable them after boot - .rc file?

Thanks, in advance!

Randel Reiss

Director Product Development

Prairie Games, Inc.

mailto:RandelR@PrairieGames.com

http://www.PrairieGames.com
 
If they make a contact, then you can't avoid the menu at boot unless you tweak the bootloader.
 
It should be possible to do this with a keymap, but to be honest that's something I still need to look into doing myself.  I'd be handy because whenever I put my pandora in a case and try to use it without removing it from the case completely, it tends to press the triggers which as you've found, makes navigating the desktop rather difficult.

But in your case I'd consider opening the base of the unit, unless you're completely hamfisted.  You shouldn't need to remove anything else and you should be able to lift out (and possibly reseat, depending on how much damage the impact did) the shoulder buttons.  I'd guess the internal buttons aren't actually busted closed so just taking the pressure off them should deactivate them.

FWIW, after a bit of poking the main avenues of interest so far seem to be ~/.pndXmodmap and /etc/keymap-extension-2.6.map but I've not connected the dots yet to figure out what it all does.
 
Getting them out again might be as easy as loosening the screws at the bottom side a bit.


They could spring out by themselves or you can get them out with a little help of a fine flathead screwdriver.
 
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