Anyone taken apart a Gaming Edge Controller?

[Snakebyte]

CompUSA has Gaming Edge controllers by Hip Interactive for $10.  Was thinking of getting a couple to take apart for a little xbox project of mine.

Anyone ever taken one apart or hacked one?

Thanks for the input!

[Snakebyte]

Well I bit the bullet and went out and got one.

Took it apart and snapped some pics.

I've never done any soldering to gamepads before does this one look pretty easy?

Here's what the board looks like


Left hand side with D pad, start and back buttons


Right side with buttons


Any hints on solder points?  I think I have to scrape the carbon stuff for the buttons...The hardest part appears to be soldering the start and back buttons.

[crashwg]

If you have a dremel or the like, don't worry about the back and start buttons.  

All you have to do is sand/grind off the middle of the contact (circled in black) and you'll be able to drop a huge glob of solder on the part in purple...

[Bgnome]

no grinding/dremeling is necessary.  each trace has a solder pad, (the little silver circle under the word "back" or the the right of "Start" for example).  just dab a little solder onto the spot, tin your wire, and you can make a good connection easily.  you may have to hunt for a good ground spot since i cant see one that is obvious from the pics.

[Sephroth57]

that looks pretty easy, they even labeled it for you

[metro]

I have bought one of these controllers and can not get it to work. I have everything wired up through a common ground on the board and can not get any of the buttons to work besides start and the controls. Any Idea on what I need to do.

[Puds]

Your problem is you need to find the ground for the second half of the controller.  ABXY Black and White should all share another same ground.  As for The R and L buttons you'll need to run wires from the bottom 2 of the three soldering points.  I've attempted to label them in paint using Snakebyte's pics. The purple is where i chose to solder a wire to be the ground wire.  You'll see the yellow is the other side of the connection which all the buttons share thus the ground.  The length of the red paint lines are not significant, they merely mean solder a wire to the solder plate the controller has provided for you and wire that to one side of your control panel button.  Also, snakebyte, even though this thread is months old, could you or perhaps someone else take a nice snapshot of what it looks like under the left joystick and what the back of the board looks like?  I recently wired four of these cheap gamepads and my hardest challenge was finding the left thumb button.  Finally i figured it out but without the left thumb button there's no way you can get to the options menu in most of the emulators.

[metro]

Ok so there are seperate grounds and I have never delt with that before. On my custom stick I have everything running off of a common ground. So my ? is can it still work like that running 2 seperte grounds from the pad to the stick and "T"ing it off or would I have to change the wiring in my stick to accomodate this pad. I'm trying to make a stick with adapters for all consoles. so I wired it with a common ground not thinking that other pads have this feature.

I tried to use the one ground wire in my cat 5 cable since I have no more available wires to go to the 2 different grounds and when I did that nothing worked at all. I also do not have the triggers wired since I only need a capcom layout..

[Snakebyte]

I haven't taken the joysticks off the board yet (not too sure how I'm going to do it) but I took some snaps of the back of the board for you:

Left side of the back of the board



Right side of the back of the board