At first I had the whole thing wired with lamp wire, but lamp wire was so brittle that every time I mounted it the wire broke. Since then I am redoing the project using speaker wire. That was going well until this happened:
Ground is not an issue, but how do I solder the wire to signal? There is no conductor for the solder to stick to. As for the masking tape, speaker wire is so thick that I put tape so the signals and grounds don’t touch.
Thank you jdm, its working fine now. However, I have run into another problem. I bought a used pad for cheap and the left and right stick love to wonder around while idle. I tried neutralizing the left stick by soldering a 5.6kohm resistor from high to wiper and wiper to ground for each axis. However, this has locked the stick in a down position and causes the controller to reboot if I move the stick up. There are too many solder points to remove the stick all together. Any advice on how to neutralize the stick (obvious sidenote: I’m using the dpad for movement).
Edit: I found that the variable resistors on the thumb sticks are easily removable. However, now both sticks are frozen at down and to the left. The presence of the resistors changes nothing.