Controller Construction

Figure 3 — Exploded view of controller. Kaboom!

We begin working on the controller. Let's start by gutting it.

If you pop open the controller (5 philips screws on the back) you'll see some pretty minimal innards. Just a few wires connecting to a simple circuit board with a chip on it (the black lump). Sever the colored wires at the board and get rid of the cable. We're going to make our own and don't need the one it came with. Next, we need to do some vandalism to the circuit board. If you look at the circuits you'll notice most of them disappear into the chip (the black lump). We need to sever these connections so the chip doesn't cause any undesired behavior. This can be done with a metal file or other sharp implement. Scratch as close to the chip as possible so as to leave the rest of the circuits unharmed for our own use. Zoom in on figure 4 to see how I scratched my circuits out. The chip connections were scratched away, and the ground was divided in half (discussed next). The white wire in the middle connects two discontiguous areas of the same ground.

Figure 4 — The front (button side) of the controller IC board. Note how the wires wrap around from the back so they don't obstruct the button pads. Also note the scratched out circuits to separate the two grounds and to prevent interference from the onboard chip (the large black spot in the middle). Red wires are for the direction pad, blue for other buttons, and white for ground.

What we're left with is a plastic case with some buttons and some contacts and no live electronics. Good, it's time to add our own. In my example I had two ground wires. You might have three, depending on how you planned your keys. What we need to do now is segment the ground area on the printed circuit board. Again, using my example, we want the ground for the direction buttons to connect to one another, but not to the ground of the other buttons. We want to scratch a little divider so that the two grounds don't touch. There may be many labrinth-like connections, so be sure to get them all. Use your continuity tester to make sure the circuits are sufficiently separated. With that done we'll set aside the controller board and work on the controller cable.

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