ok I tried to attempt on soldering this Cerberus board tonight and I learned a lot from using really shitty radioshack iron and solder. I wanted to know if its too late to salvage my poor attempts at this? or should I really buy a new board and higher quality iron for this type of job?
I accidentally melted the START contacts right off and I’m wondering if your able to use those tiny holes that traces to the START contact for an alternative?
A couple things:
You have too much bare wire showing, trim those down and resolder
Yes, you can use the holes as long as the trace isnt burned from where you took the contact off. You can also follow the trace from the pad and scrape/solder to that on the way to the main chip. You could even solder directly to whichever leg of the chip it is for Start.
Way too much bare wire, you need like 2 or 2 millimeters worth of exposed wire not a half inch.
I learned the that using the cheap soldering tools just isn’t going to end well. I kinda regret diving in not fully being aware of the consequences. Thank you to both of you for the insight. Now those tiny holes look damn hard to solder. I’ll see what I can do to salvage this.
Thank you
Would you guys know the documentation for those VIAS also, I need to buy small wires to fit those tiny holes.
I use anywhere from 24 to 30 awg wire, with 26-28 would be at your sweet spot. 30 and 32 gets too thin.
I’d have to look over the board layout real quick to give you an indication on where to solder to recover. The alternative is to give you a one off firmware that changes that START pin to something else… like one of the unused axis pins.
Perak how would I go about doing that?
I’m interested in that. As I have a friend while installing this got the solder pad too hot and does not have a jab.
I just brought the board up to look over, neither one of those signals has a really easy to reach spot.
Give me a little time this week and I’ll try to create 2 firmware one offs, one for start replacing LSY or something with START and then 1P.
Can you tell me if you got your boards semi-recently Yenjoi? I need to know if you have an ATMEGA32U4 or an ATMEGA16U4 so that the firmware works properly. I swapped to the smaller chip more recently.
edit:
An easy way to find out is to go into FLIP, enter bootloader mode, and select the chip like normal but choose one or the other and see if the channel opens over USB or it gives you an error, then try the other chip and do the same.
I got the board around 1 month ago with an order from focus attack so I guess it was semi recently.
I’ll do the method you mentioned when j return from work however
Thank you for going the extra mile for me. I really appreciate it
Hey there.
I recently installed the non-solder variant of this PCB into my Fightstick Pro. Tested it on my PS3 with success, tested the 360 Mode on my PC with success and tested the PS3 Mode on my PC with somewhat success. The problem is that when simply plugging the stick into my PC without setting it to 360 (I assume it defaults to PS3 mode then), the Light and Medium buttons will be swapped; Light Kick will be Medium Kick, Light Punch will be Medium Punch, and vice versa. This is confusing me as on the PS3 itself, all the buttons are correctly assigned and where they should be. It’s not a real issue as I can just assign it to 360 mode instead, it’s just somewhat of an annoyance that if possible I’d like to fix. Don’t know if it’s worth noting, but when I plug in my Dualshock 3 controller to my PC, all buttons are assigned as they should be.
Aside from that though, great work on the PCB, man! This is a real godsend for people like myself who don’t want to shell out £100 or so on another arcade stick just so I can play one or two games on a separate console.
Thanks.
Will the Cerberus work on it’s own? without mounting it on a 360PCB?
Yes.
I’ve gotten a PS3 for the holidays and picked up a Cerberus to dual mod an Xbox 360 Mad Catz Fightstick PRO I’ve had sitting around as a back up stick. Installation went well enough and I’ve been happily playing Xrd on the PS3 for a few days, as well as using the stick on PC.
I’m fairly certain I tested it in my Xbox as well right after installation, just to ensure myself it worked. But now 3-4 days after installing/testing the Cerberus (only used in PS3 since that first try) I’m having issues with the left directional input on when the stick is in 360 mode, both in the 360 itself as well as forcing 360 mode when plugging into my PC. A calibration test in the device properties on PC shows that when the stick is in “Cerberus” mode (plugged in normally) I can rotate the stick and get all 8 directional inputs registering, but in forced 360 mode rotating the stick only shows inputs 89632 (in numpad notation) registering, missing the 147. Although I didn’t use it very recently, or often at all, I know for sure that this stick worked fine in the past on the 360.
I’m on my way out the door this evening but in the next day or two if I have time I’m planning to crack it open again and just check all the wires or re-seat some of the connections. I’m not too familiar with this sort of stuff so I don’t know if this will have any effect at all, or how else to troubleshoot, but based on how I understand the Cerberus works this issue seemed somewhat strange. A button not working in one mode but behaving normally in the other means it’s not the button/joystick itself but must be a problem with one of the boards.
Now all I’ll be thinking about all night is if I really fully tested it on 360 earlier in the week when I installed the mod, or if I just plugged it in to see if it recognized it and then just went to bed…
1 - How did you connect your directionals from the Madcatz TE 360 PCB to the Cerberus?
2 - How did you connect the joystick to the 360 TE PCB and Cerberus?
3 - Pics would help determine the cause a lot easier, but it sounds like the solder point for the left directional on the 360 PCB is not soldered well enough or the pin connection via the 5pin Molex connector that traditionally goes directly from the 360 TE PCB to the joystick isn’t plugged in all the way and the pins aren’t making the connection. Again it all depends on the answers to the first two questions. Your directional issue can’t be directly caused by the Cerberus or joystick, as you’ve tested them out on PS3 and it works properly, so the issue has to be from the 360 TE PCB to X location depending on how you wired it. You may also want to take a multimeter and test that the 360 TE PCB directional for left is indeed connected to the Cerberus PCB. It’s likely it’s not connected, and that’s why you’re not getting anything in 360 mode either via PC or on console.
I used the solderless version, probably should have specified. I’ll check/re-seat the connections (both the ribbons connecting to the Cerberus as well as the Cerberus’s connection to the underlying 360 PCB) once I have a chance in the next couple days amidst all the holiday/family obligations.
It actually sounds like the boards aren’t fully together, specifically the JLF area/left side of the boards. I would pull the entire thing out of the stick and seat them together outside of it so you can get a full look and make sure everything is seated properly. Then pull them apart and do it again inside of the stick, since things will be sort of bent in the correctly needed direction then.
Took the boards out and as expected, the connection between the Cerberus and the 360 PCB was a bit weak on one side. Reconnected them outside of the stick and dropped the two, now well-attached, back into the stick. Everything’s working great on both consoles.
Thanks for the advice! Love the performance so far!
@Phreakazoid
I went to FA’s site to check on a Phreakmods Cerberus connector version and they are out of stock. Will they be getting more and what would be the time frame on that.
Thanks for any answers.