Guitar Hero II Controller Not Powering On

[mcdonalds]

I have a Guitar Hero II Controller that doesn't power up that I got from eBay as defective.  I would guess that I should check the wires in the cord by splicing the whole cord.  What do you guys think?  I also don't have the Guitar Hero II Game to test this on, so is there any way to test all the functions on the controller without the game?  Thanks.

[kendrick]

It's been my experience that a lot of the Harmonix hardware from that era have cold solder joints. So the cable is less likely to be the failure point, but the part that stinks is that there's no way to distinguish bad solder visually. What I ended up doing was taking a soldering iron to the larger joints (and all the ICs) and reflowing them one at a time.

If I'm not mistaken, the buttons on a Guitar Hero controller do correspond neatly to other buttons on a standard controller, so you might be able to use some other game with known inputs. Probably putting a USB adapter on it and using the game device input on your PC would provide more definitive results. What console is this axe for, incidentally?

[mcdonalds]

This is for Xbox 360.  Sorry.  I forgot to mention that.  I'll crack it open and take another look.

[kendrick]

Oh wait, is it a wired controller? You should be able to use the 360 controller driver for Windows to test the buttons and other functions, since it's already a USB device.

[mcdonalds]

Oh wait, is it a wired controller? You should be able to use the 360 controller driver for Windows to test the buttons and other functions, since it's already a USB device.

It is a wired controller.  I just reflowed all the solder joints.  I have found out that I need to pick the cord up and drop it onto the ground to make it light up.  It will keep flashing.  The funny thing is that when it was on my desk instead of in my hands, it powered on and connected to my Xbox 360 with a steady one player light, but the D-Pad was a little bit funny such as down being up, left being down, etc.  I am assuming that the D-Pad's Rubber Contacts was placed in the wrong place?  I also think that the cord has a break somewhere.  Would this mean that I have to splice the stem (The part that gets placed between the two halves of the controller) too?  Sorry for the long reply; I've been taking a look at this for a while.

[mcdonalds]

Should I splice the entire cord including the stem?  Also, what do you guys think I should do about the D-Pad problem?

[kendrick]

Cord splicing is never fun, especially since it's nearly impossible to get every wire the right length and spacing. More productive is to remove the faulty cable entirely and solder a new cable to the board directly. That way you get to control the overall length, you're guaranteed continuity and you don't have a nasty plastic or tape cover on one part of the cable. That's how I would handle it.