And...  Done!!

IT was a massive pain in the ass, the research took hours while I looked for the best solder points for every button.  After that there was all the scratching to remove the green, then the pre-soldering, the soldering, and throughout it all I had to concentrate on making sure I could still close the damned thing later.  =D

But it worked, first try. 

Now though I'm not so sure the Competition Pro is the right choice, but that's fine.  With a neo connector on there I can use pretty much any of my existing sticks.

Now, the pics!

Here's where i had planned to drill the hole.  It was a MUCH better option than the face, above the BACK button, like I suggested in the first post.  I didn't have a drill or bits, so I just melted my way through with a soldering iron.  I think this was actually the better plan.


You can see here the hole is pretty much complete.  This is the only place on the 360 to put the hole, and it's pretty much perfect.  It doesn't interfere with the battery, and you can't even tell it's there during play.  It's possible that it'll block the play-n-charge unit, but since I don't have one (and batteries are cheap) I don't care too much.




This PCB is really a tiny bit of work.  The traces and all connections are soooo tiny.  And the chip?  No f**king way I was going to try soldering to that thing, the pins were way too small to even imagine success.


Here I've labelled the vias for each connection on the other side.  Since you can't solder to the switch/pad itself (which would ruin the pad if it DID work since the rubber bits wouldn't fit anymore...) I figured this was the best place.


And these are the last of the buttons.  Since these ones all came up through the PCB underneath the chip, there's no way to solder to all the connections on the same side of the PCB.  This complicated things a little.


Here you can see I've scratched away the green, and applied fresh solder to the vias.  It's a bit of secret shame here that I seem to have broken a trace: the pad's A button doesn't work anymore (but the wire connected to the A point above works fine!)


And here I've pre-soldered the points on the other side.  You have to pre-solder them, or you'll go insane trying to solder the wires to these points later.


The wires...  Group 'em tight and glue 'em down!


Routing them next to the analogue stick is really the only option.  All other paths will take it across some area you want to keep clear: screw holes, connectors, d-pad switch pads...  This did cause some trouble with the plastic support surrounding the stick, but it was nothing the sidecutters couldn't cure!




I attached a zap-strap to the cable to keep it from pulling out of the pad and ruining my delicate handiwork...


A dab of hot-glue keeps the wires from pulling off the PCB.  There's another on the top to keep the brown wire from drifting into the screw hole...


Some pointers if you want to try this:

1. One shoulder button is easy to reach (grey wire, last image) but the other is underneath the plastic trigger assembly.  That's why the brown wire goes over the top of the PCB.

2. Soldering to the vias is a PITA.  I wouldn't suggest it if there were any other way.  Practice on something you don't like first.

Cool, I'll agree the d-pad sucks..........but being the worst? You've never used the D pad on a Dreamcast controller? Or a Gamecube controller?
The Cube controller is my fav controller ever (Very ergonomic) but the D pad was designed for a 2 foot tall elf to use!

What a nice mod you've done

The worst d-pads ever are on PSX (possibly PS2 too I think, not used one). Dreamcast and SNES have ok d-pad, MD 3 buttoner has great d-pad, 6 buttoner great too... I think Saturn has a great d-pad too, will find out soon.
Can't comment on other systems... never used any.

Nice.

Quick soldering technique question:

How did you actually manage to pre-solder those spots?  You didn't carry the solder over on the tip of the iron did you? If not...how small of a soldering iron tip do you have!?

people have to learn to love flux (soldering paste)... scrape green off, add a little bit of flux on the spot, touch with well tinned soldering iron for a second, presto, spot tinned, ready for wire to be soldered on it.

I usually put some piece of paper between the silicon rubber switch things and the pad itself... increases accuracy/responsiveness a lot... sometimes too much...

Dude, you're frickin' killing me with this.  I've tried modding joysticks to work with the Xbox 360, and they've been varying degrees of disappointing.  Both times, I plucked the Xbox 360 control pads out of the joysticks and used them for other projects (a PC spinner for one, and a Vectrex joystick with the other).

There was another Xbox 360 to Atari adapter I'd heard about online, but it was a lot more complicated and less elegant than this one.  Here's the link:

http://gtpunch.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!42F636BDC7C6C2DB/

This guy needed opticouplers, resistors, and a partridge in a pear tree to get his running.  It doesn't look like you needed any of those extra parts, and I'm also going to assume that you only used one ground wire for this mod.  I could never make that work with either of my joysticks...

For future reference, if you're ever looking for a cheap controller that you can use in an Xbox 360 project, one that you could hack to bits without hesitation, I'd recommend the MadCatz classic arcade joypad.  Note that this is the ONLY time I would ever recommend this piece of crap, as using it as it was originally manufactured is a huge mistake.

Can I use this mod for use with an Arcade contol panel ( JAMMA )?? Thnx!