Weekend Project – XBox 360 Conterol Fixed

A year or so ago my brother-in-law spilled water on my Halo3 Xbox 360 controller. It never worked again until this weekend. A friend of mine had a controller with a bad right bumper. So what did I do? I put them together of course.

I have not use a soldering iron in a few years, at least not to work on circuit boards with. I thought that the right bumper might just be a broken piece of plastic, this was not the case. It was indeed a bad button. So I stared to remove a button from the other controllers circuit board.

The way that there were put together I had to also remove the right trigger. The first one I tried was on the board that no longer worked. I felt that I would have ok odds if something went back on that board that killing a board that worked and just had a bad button.

After getting the buttons off of bother controllers and the right triggers. I put the button from the bad controller and the the right trigger back that was on the board to start with. Putting things back together was a snap.

What do we have? A working controller again. This was wonderful, I now have 2 working XBox 360 controllers again. It took me about 2 hours to get done. My soldering iron is a butane one and I had to refill it at least once. I’m sure that I could have done it faster, but not knowing what I was getting into, and the fact that i haven’t soldered in a number of years, slowed me down. That was a quick $60 savings. Besides the time, the parts were free.

If you have never soldered before, this is not something that you would want to attempt, at least don’t expect it to work your first time around. You will also need some solder wick to remove the parts so that you do not over heat them and burn them out.

Happy Modding, Fixxing, or what ever it is that you do.