Card edge connectors. Clean with pencil eraser, then rubbing alcohol on a cotton swab. That was my ritual anyway. Maybe I wasn’t the most normal kid.
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At work we used to have a CRT next to a safe…you could see the colors shift on the monitor when you opened the safe door.
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Which actually makes a certain amount of sense: on most modern smartphones(likely any that would tell you to do that) you have a magnetometer and a multi-axis accelerometer onboard, often in a single package; but definitely at a known orientation with respect to the body of the handset.
Going through that series of motions, while silly looking, allows all three axes of the accelerometer to experience the (approximately constant, your crust density may vary) force of gravity and puts the magnetometer in a variety of positions relative to magnetic north.
Hardly perfect; but if you are trying to identify and compensate for unknown errors/variations without telling the user to go call NIST, running the device against the constants that are readily available is your best option.
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Yeah, it’s certainly doable in software. The “Mystifiy” screen saver that Windows has shipped with since before the Trilobite wars(I’m pretty sure I remember it in 3.1, no idea when it was first added) looks reasonably similar; and back when Winamp really whipped the llama’s ass I’m sure that there were visualization plugins that did more or less exactly the same thing.
I’m just a lousy enough programmer that I don’t feel any magic in the results I get there; while the “loudspeaker coils and CRT control yokes are both just electromagnets of modest impedance; Kraftwerk shall steer the electron beam now!” process was loads of fun.
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