Turbo Express: Button Fix

[NFG]

The other day I had some teen girls in the house and I was plying 'em with retrogames (hey, whatever works right?)  Imagine the depths of my failure when the girl playing the Turbo Express couldn't actually play anything.  Button I and II didn't work, but the rest of the controls did.  Games could be started but not played, it was frustrating.

I cracked it open and gave it a cleaning to no avail, so I looked closer.  There was a capacitor on the control PCB that was corroded, but I'm not sure it led to the problem itself: the carbon traces were no longer connected to the metal ones they covered.  This meant that no signal was reaching the button pad.

So I bypassed the carbon tracks with a couple of wires:

I elected to drill holes through the PCB and run the wires underneath the board rather than risk new parts under the rubber button pads.  If you've ever done that, it sucks - it makes the controller you fixed immensely frustrating to use.

You can see the wires don't come up very far.  Basically, the metal core pokes through and lies over flat, minimizing any potential for interference with the rubber button pads.

And that's it.  Instant success.  I have never seen this sort of internal carbon corrosion before.  Electricity simply stopped flowing at the 'fail point'.  Happily it was an easy fix.

[fluxcore]

Mega necro bump, but my TE just had this exact problem. Jumpered the connections in the same way (plus a couple of others that were looking a bit dodgy too) and now works great! Thanks for the writeup.

Gotta love single sided PCBs

[NFG]

Woo!  Glad it helped.  =)

[crypticxchill]

very nice way to go about it, too - super clean. Never would have thought of just drilling holes in it, would have been worried to miss the traces and that they might not make contact with the wire ends.