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Wired Xbox 360 LED Lighted Controller
Mod
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Tools-
Variable temp soldering station or 15watt iron
Hot Glue Gun
Phillips #1
wire stripper
X-acto knife with #11 blade and old style aluminum handle
Drill with 17/64 bit
Plyers
Supplies-
.22 60/40 rosin core solder
Surface
Mount LED's
Hot Glue
30 AWG wire
Resistor
Replacing the Surface Mount LED's With the circuit board exposed we can get down to the
detail. You will need to remove four LED's they can be found around
the upper center of the PCB. So yeah they are pretty dang small. If
you have never wielded a soldering iron stop right now and put everything back
how it was! If you are a fearless soldering god continue on...
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To get our first one done it required two of us.
We setup with one of us on the tweezers and each with an iron.
Irons set to 550 F we went to work, get a good grip on the LED and a
quick touch to the solder from each side simultaneously did the trick.
We then busted out the hot tweezers we have never had occasion to use
before and found that a much easier option. |
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But if you are doing this alone we found the slickest way
is to bathe the LED in solder and use the iron to wipe it away and then just
deposit it on your sponge. Its important to clean up after, you do not
want much solder on the pads during reinstallation. And of course, be
careful not get any on the sensitive gray black pads in the area. |
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Re-installing is much easier and a one man job, like any
other tiny SMT component line it up, tack one side and then the other.
They do sort of have a tendency to float up and if there is too much solder left
so don't be afraid to offer a little gentle down force while heating the solder.
Note the polarity marks for the led and make sure to put them on the right
direction. |
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Original Green |
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Blue |
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Red |
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Lighting the Dome- To get the dome illuminated we tried several variations,
one LED, two LED's, but ended up going with four for full bling. With blue
LED's, 4 in parallel a 22 Ohm resistor is connected to all positive legs and the
resistor is connected to the positive source. All negative legs (short
ones) are connected to ground. When using 4 red LED's a 47 Ohm resistor
was used (How to calculate the proper
resistor for your LED's).
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There are more than a couple ways you can get all
the positive contacting each other and also get all the negative leads
contacting each other. In this photo you see an untouched 360
button as well as a completed blue LED mod. In the following
photos we will be demonstrating a dual ring style wiring pattern that is
easier to accomplish. |
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Start by making some room for the led leg wiring
by snipping out some of the support of the button. Make sure to leave a bit in the middle for
strength and to give you a reference of how far you can fill at the end.
I like to leave a plus sign in the middle for a handy way to remember
which way the led's should be wired. |
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Stick the tip of the glue gun in a hole and
squirt some hot glue in to about 3/4
full. The idea is to fill the hole but not so far that you don't
have room to work and keep the level low enough so the button still
works properly. Insert the led with the LONG leg toward the center
plus sign.. get it positive :) You want to push the led in far
enough so you have room to work but not all the way to the front so the
light spreads well.
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You should end up with something like this.
Note the plus in the center and the long legs all set closest to it.
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Now you want to start folding and trimming the
legs in a way that forms a ring with the legs touching one another.
The key is to make the ring of legs lower than your center plus sign so
your level will not be to high. Look at the photo and note where you
want to start and finish the outside ring. You want to leave a gap
between the larger of the keyed tabs of the button. The wire will
eventually run out of that gap in the control case. |
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When your completed you should have something
like this. Again, note the gap on the outer ring coincides with
the larger keyed tab. Mmm rings, 360... rings... coincidence? Now go through and solder all of the joints of
the ring and create a connection between all of the led's.
Remember there is a inner ring and a outer ring that should not be
connected to each other. |
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Next solder a wire about 6" long to the inside
ring. This will be your positive lead, remember the plus
sign you left :) Again you want to place the wire so that it
will be running over the larger of the keyed tabs. |
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Now attach a 6" long wire to the outside ring which is negative.
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Position your wires so they are running out over
the larger of the keyed tabs. |
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If you have done it right you should have some
open space where you were wiring and the center plus should be the
highest area inside the button. This is a great time to hook the
led's up with the proper resistor for the parallel led's you have just
wired and make sure the whole thing works. After you have verified
that everything is working ok you can fill any extra space with hot
glue. MOST IMPORTANT, you must not fill the button past the
center plus signs level. If you do the button will always be
pressed and will not work properly. I just happen to have the
perfect tool for making a nice clean level surface on the inside of the
button.. it is a large X-acto knife's butt end. I'm sure you can
find something that will work. |
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Now place your status ring and the guide button
back into the controller with the wires exiting the button area through
the large gap in the status ring. Leave a very small amount of
slack for button movement and tack the wires into the crack like so. |
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Next grab your controller PCB and flip it over
and look where the USB cable connects to the board. Note which
contact is red and which is black. Connect to the red positive
lead the proper resistor for the amount and configuration led's (this
was four blue led's so we used a 22ohm resistor). Now connect your
positive wire from the guide button to the other end of the resistor.
Next connect your negative wire from the guide button to the black
negative lead of the controller. |
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A little dab of hot glue will keep the whole
works in check and make sure nothing can short. You can now plug
the controller into the USB port and it should be gravy. |
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Reinstall all of your buttons, rubber contact
pads, thumb stick, d-pad and front and back pieces. Then place the
controller PCB board onto the top case. When closing this part of
the controller take note of the photo and make sure your wires are free
and clear of the screw hole and standoff area so you don't end up with
shorts or cut wires. Get it all back in place, replace your rumble
motors, slap your back cover on and your in like flint baby.. your
all done! |
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Lighting the
Start and Back buttons - we tried drilling out the existing start and
back buttons but found them to be too opaque to get a good result with an
LED. So we tried a few options to get a good looking functional
lighted button. We settled upon a two part epoxy with some white
pigment cast in a silicon mold. I'd love to go into detail and
probably will in another article someday about mold making but suffice to
say we tried many materials and techniques and finally got a translucent
button with a smooth shiny finish.
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Lighting the ABXY Buttons is a
difficult proposition, there just isn't enough room for the wires so they
need to be short. The trick is to get the wires routed so they do not
disturb the gray pads that make contact with the PCB.
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The button starts out like this |
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We start by wrapping a button in some foam of
protection and then grasp in a normal pliers |
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Drilling out
the button- we found that a smaller drill bit than the perfect fit
size worked best, it gives the bit a chance to bounce around and
dice up the four pegs. |
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empty the chopped-up bits of button
frequently, keep checking the depth getting there... |
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oh so close... but gotta go a bit further
those bits of plastic will leave a shadow |
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there nice and smooth no bumps to leave
shadows. |
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If we go a little deeper we dip into the
transparent outer leaving the letter floating. This can be an
interesting effect but ends up looking a little hot spotted with a
white LED. If you want to go with this method I would
recommend using an LED of the corresponding colors rather than
white. |
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We found
cutting a portion of the button above the largest plastic tab was
the best option for routing the 30AWG wire. There is already
plenty of space in the controller face to route through. If
you were to use the existing notch all the buttons have to route the
wire that would work fine for making the button but that lines up
with a part of the face that would have to be cut.
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A little snip with some shears and a little
clean up of the rough edges with an xacto and we are in business. |
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Preparing
the LED, We then bend the LED legs close to the LED at a 90 degree
angle. |
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Start with
two colors of 30AWG wire, a dark one for ground and a bright one for
hot, we will be using black and red for this example. |
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once the
wires are soldered bend them away from the legs |
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with a quick snip we have an LED on a string. |
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we fill our button about half way with hot
glue and submerge our LED |
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then top it off with some more glue |
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Jamb the x-acto handle into the button to
squish out any excess hot glue. The glue exposed to the handle
will solidify quickly. To remove the handle twist the button
off, this causes the hotglue to release without warping which may
occur if pulled straight out. |
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This should make a nice flat layer at the
same height as the original button.
It is important to get a
level surface at the original height to allow for normal operation
of the buttons. If it is even the smallest bit higher than it
should be the button will not have the tactile response of the
rubber flexing-pop as it will already be partially flexed. |
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Twist the wires together to make it more
manageable when it comes to installation. Repeat the process
for all the other buttons. If you make a mistake you can
always drill out the button again, so it may be a good idea to get a
couple extra LED's for good measure. |
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to top
Modded button installation now the hard part.
We have to get all the good stuff to fit in the space we have to work with.
This makes assembly a bit of a trick. For this example they are
all red LED's and have different power requirements than the white LED's we
are using in the ABXY buttons. Each set can be wired in parallel.
6 red LED's need a 25 Ohm resistor. The 4 white need a 22 Ohm resistor.
This will be different for your LED's
read here to learn how to calculate
the proper resistor
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In this photo we have the dome and start and
back buttons already wired to power. I spend a bit of time
bending the ABXY button wires to tuck up and away from the circuit board.
It took a lot of removing and re-inserting the buttons, bend the
wire this way and that but finally got them all in good spots. |
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Here I am attempting to judge the length of
the wires, in the end I made them as short as I could and still
allow the buttons to fit in the face plate. The wires were all
cut at the same length, then colors matched up, the ends stripped
and tinned. The positive wires go to the resistor calculated
above, soldered to the far right controller wire pin and the
negative wires to to the second to the left pin on the controller
wire. |
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When getting ready to add the top lid I
positioned all the buttons exactly like they would be in the face
plate and then carefully lowered the lid and used tweezers to feed
the buttons into their spots. |
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Getting everything in place is difficult,
when closing the controller everything should settle into place.
If you have to force it something is not right. |
back to top
Rumble motor activated LED by
using the rumble motor power we can add an LED that comes on when the
controller rumbles. To do this we should check the power being
delivered to the motor and plug it into an
LED calculator. To find out what the resistor value should be.
We find
that the peak voltage is at about 2V, this is under the voltage required by
our LED so no resistor is needed to drop the voltage. We simply solder
our positive and negative leads from the LED to the opposite side of the PCB
as the rumble motor connector. .
-TheJT
-Llamma
Xbox 360 mod, 360 controller, LED mod, 360
wireless, controller mod, mod, mods,
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