Replacement cable on controller

[phrunt]

Has anyone replaced a controllers cable before? I've got 2 controllers that play up, If I bend the cable in a certain spot they both work, it's damage inside the cable right up near where it goes into the controller, I wrap them in lots of tape and they stay working as the cable can't bend then.

I ordered some replacement cables from Aliexpress thinking I'd just swap them over, yet the Aliexpress cables only have 4 wires, and my controllers have 6.

This is the replacement cables I bought, I bought a few of them so I'd have spares.

I see in the feedback from buyers people have made them work by soldering the yellow wire on the cable to the location of the green wire, here is a couple of photos where people have done it

Does this seem right? Am I safe to do this and not blow my USB ports on my Xbox when I plug it in? Will it work as its meant to with 2 wires missing?   Seems odd.

 

 

Edited October 23 by phrunt

[nikeymikey]

If it works it works lol 

One thing I would be wary of is that those cables are the ones that come on the cheap control pads that you can also get from Ali and the plugs are VERY brittle. 

[fox]

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right up near where it goes into the controller,

Easily fixed. Shorten the cable down past the bad portion and solder it back in. If the break were farther down the cable you'd be stuck with some real work.

Edited October 23 by fox

[phrunt]

5 hours ago, fox said:

Easily fixed. Shorten the cable down past the bad portion and solder it back in. If the break were farther down the cable you'd be stuck with some real work.

Thank you, great idea.  It appears the two black wires are just shield wires or something, well one of them certainly is as it's wired in with the shielding around the cable, so maybe those Chinese cables will work but have no shielding.

I took your advice and just cut the cable short.  In doing so I had to cut the ferrite section off it, I then had the little cable support to deal with, I was able to for the most part rescue that by drilling out the wire inside it as it was molded to the cable, then push the good bit of cable through it.  I had to cut a split at one end to be able to get the cable through but I was able to sort that with liquid rubber joining it back together, works a treat as does the controller, all fixed.  Thanks for the great tip.

The left side of the cable is where the damage was somewhere inside it, I had to hold that straight for the controller to work, if it bent it wouldn't work, you can still see the residue of the tape I had wrapped around it to hold it straight to make the controller usable.  

Handy with these clear controllers you can see my work, I put heat shrink over all of my wire joins.  

Controller works like new.  I hope that ferrite isn't necessary for some reason, I've got clip on ones I could add if beneficial.

Edited October 23 by phrunt

[fox]

Good work phrunt. Maybe you could drill through the ferrite's housing, too, and slip the cable in? I usually just crack those open and reattach the ferrites with heat shrink tubing when redoing controllers. My main controller has no ferrite and gives me no trouble, so maybe you're good without it.

IIRC (could be wrong though), the dimensions of a ferrite determine what frequency of EMI to suppress, and xbox controller ones may have been selected with a particular frequency range in mind, so if those clip-on ones are differently sized and don't help should you run into problems, that may be why.

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you can still see the residue of the tape

Ugh.

Lemme tellya, I'd rather have my ass caned in singapore than deal with electrical tape gunk again.

[phrunt]

A thing I'm really enjoying about my new found hobby of restoring my Xboxes is keeping this two-decade old technology alive, it's fantastic tech, playing all these old games all over again.... my 13-year-old daughter loves it, she's more interested in the emulators and original Xbox games than modern games, she's seen my appreciation for the older games and their gameplay.

I have another controller to tackle yet, similar problem and I suspect it's also a cable problem, it's got very similar behaviour, the cable in a certain position works, if it moves into the wrong one the controller drops out.  Seems like damage in the same place so I'll start doing the same I did to this one, failing that I'll try one of the Chinese cables.  

[prtscn]

Two missing wires are for composite video for light guns, not sure how a memory port would utilize it.

[phrunt]

Thanks, @prtscn

I had another original controller that had the same fault as the first one, it was the small white wire that had a break in this controller, I was able to see the break when I opened it up. If the cable was held in the right spot it worked, so it must have made enough contact.

I repaired it the same way as the first but worked out if I use silicone grease I can push the cable up through the strain relief thing far easier so I didn't have to put a cut in it this time to make its hole bigger.

Once done I used the controller test software and tried everything out and it was great except the left vibrate motor didn't' work at all, it wasn't a wiring problem so I used a motor out of a cheap Chinese controller that I had that was faulty, this motor worked occasionally, other times when it started to spin the controller would drop out and say its unplugged and as soon as the motor stopped trying to work the controller returned automatically so gaves that use vibration would randomly say the controller is disconnected for a few seconds, so I just removed the motor entirely and will run it without that vibration, at least it's still a usable controller.