A button that stopped working has probably led to more than a few smashed remotes over the years. Fortunately [pescado99] has shared a beautifully simple cure for dead or dying remote buttons: graphite dry lubricant.

Most remotes operate by pushing a conductive carbon coating on the back of the button onto a pair of contacts on the PCB. Unfortunately, that conductive coating can wear off, leaving you with a dead or dying button. The video after the break [pescado99] demonstrates how to use a cotton swab to apply powdered graphite to the rear of the buttons to make them conductive again. A soft pencil can also be used, but the graphite works better.

This beautifully simple hack is too good not to share and could save many remotes from landfills. If you’re more interested in upgrading remote, you can build your own universal remote or replace it with a web browser.

Part of the reason MIDI has hung on as a standard in the musical world for so long is that it is incredibly versatile. Sure, standard instruments like pianos and drums can be interfaced with a computer fairly easily using this standard, but essentially anything can be converted to a MIDI instrument with the right wiring and a little bit of coding. [Jeremy] needed to build a MIDI controller in a single day, and with just a few off-the-shelf parts he was able to piece together a musical instrument from his parts bin.

The build is housed in an off-brand protective case from a favorite American discount tool store, but the more unique part of the project is the choice to use arcade buttons as the instrument’s inputs. [Jeremy] tied eight of these buttons to an Arduino Uno to provide a full octave’s worth of notes, and before you jump to the comments to explain that there are 12 notes in an octave, he also added a button to the side of the case to bend any note when pressed simultaneously. An emergency stop button serves as a master on/off switch and a MIDI dongle on the other side serves as the interface point to a computer.

After a slight bit of debugging, the interface is up and running within [Jeremy]’s required 24-hour window. He’s eventually planning to use it to control a custom MIDI-enabled drum kit, but for now it was fun to play around with it in some other ways. He’s also posted the project code on a GitHub page. And, if this looks a bit familiar, this was not [Jeremy]’s first MIDI project. He was also the creator of one of the smallest MIDI interfaces we’ve ever seen.

Today, you likely often authenticate or pay for things with a tap, either using a chip in your card, or with your phone, or maybe even with your watch or a Yubikey. Now, imagine doing all these things way back in 1998 with a single wearable device that you could shower or swim with. Sound crazy?

These types of transactions and authentications were more than possible then. In fact, the Java ring and its iButton brethren were poised to take over all kinds of informational handshakes, from unlocking doors and computers to paying for things, sharing medical records, making coffee according to preference, and much more. So, what happened?

Just Press the Blue Dot

Perhaps the most late-nineties piece of tech jewelry ever produced, the Java Ring is a wearable computer. It contains a tiny microprocessor with a million transistors that has a built-in Java Virtual Machine (JVM), non-volatile storage, and an serial interface for data transfer.

Technically speaking, this thing has 6 Kb of NVRAM expandable to 128 Kb, and up to 64 Kb of ROM (PDF). It runs the Java Card 2.0 standard, which is discussed in the article linked above.

While it might be the coolest piece in the catalog, the Java ring was just one of many ways to get your iButton. But wait, what is this iButton I keep talking about?

In 1989, Dallas Semiconductor created a storage device that resembles a coin cell battery and uses the 1-Wire communication protocol. The top of the iButton is the positive contact, and the casing acts as ground. These things are still around, and have many applications from holding bus fare in Istanbul to the immunization records of Canadian cows.

For $15 in 1998 money, you could get a Blue Dot receptor to go with it for sexy hardware two-factor authentication into your computer via serial or parallel port. Using an iButton was as easy as pressing the ring (or what have you) up against the Blue Dot.

Indestructible Inside and Out, Except for When You Need It

Made of of stainless steel and waterproof grommets, this thing is built to be indestructible. The batteries were rated for a ten-year life, and the ring itself for one million hot contacts with Blue Dot receptors.

This thing has several types of encryption going for it, including 1024-bit RSA public-key encryption, which acts like a PGP key. There’s a random number generator and a real-time clock to disallow backdating transactions. And the processor is driven by an unstabilized ring oscillator, so it constantly varies its clock speed between 10 and 20 MHz. This way, the speed can’t be detected externally.

But probably the coolest part is that the embedded RAM is tamper-proof. If tampered with, the RAM undergoes a process called rapid zeroization that erases everything. Of course, while Java Rings and other iButton devices maybe be internally and externally tamper-proof, they can be lost or stolen quite easily. This is part of why the iButton came in many form factors, from key chains and necklaces to rings and watch add-ons. You can see some in the brochure below that came with the ring:

The Part You’ve Been Waiting For

I seriously doubt I can get into this thing without totally destroying it, so these exploded views will have to do. Note the ESD suppressor.

So, What Happened?

I surmise that the demise of the Java Ring and other iButton devices has to do with barriers to entry for businesses — even though receptors may have been $15 each, it simply cost too much to adopt the technology. And although it was stylish to Java all the things at the time, well, you can see how that turned out.

If you want a Java Ring, they’re on ebay. If you want a modern version of the Java Ring, just dissolve a credit card and put the goodies in resin.