XBOX S Controller Repair:
When I was doing some repairs for someone local, they said they had a XBOX S Controller that was not working that I could have for free as an extra bonus if I wanted it. So I accepted it!
It is of course dead. On closer inspection we can see the cord is badly damaged close to the strain relief and it looks like the ground connections have become broken:
So first job is to open up the controller. don’t forget that there is a screw hidden under a barcode sticker:
For a quick and easy test, I bent the cable over the controller, pulled out the ground from the damaged part of the cable and soldered that directly to the appropriate connection on the controllers PCB:
The controller now works. So we know this is the only problem!
Now I needed to take note of how the controller is wired up so I flip it back over:
I decided I was going to try to re-use the original cable, strain relief and original connector so I de-soldered the connector from the controller PCB:
Since I did not have enough usable original cable I had to cut it above the ferrite bead and then I also cut it below it to make it easier for me to work on the original connector:
I then pulled off the original cable relief which appears to be bonded to the cable but with some force you can remove it though some of the cables plastic sleeving will end up still stuck inside of the relief and by using some small tweezers and files I managed to clean up after way too much effort:
Now using tweezers again I pulled out all the crimp terminals from the connector and then opened up the crimp around the wire and cut off the wire as close to the crimp as possible:
I then stripped and cleaned up the end of the remaining cable that I was going to re-use, slid the old cable relief back onto it and added heat shrink to finish it up:
Now I simply soldered each of the wires to the original crimp terminals (as it would not be possible to crimp a new contact), re-closed the crimp around the end of the wires and re-inserted them into the connector:
I then soldered this connector back onto the PCB:
I also replaced the analog thumb sticks (360 controllers use the same type):
Then finally I cleaned and re-assembled the controller:
Using the Xbox Controller Tool I double checked everything was working perfectly which it was:
It is a shame I lost the ferrite bead (these help to absorb electronic noise) on the controller end but this will not hinder its ability to function.