Hey all,
Need help hacking a JR9-00012 XBox 360 Wireless Controller. Purchased recently and didn’t know that MS had changed the design. Want to be able to connect arcade buttons to the left and right button as well as one of the analog clicks. Easily attached to all D-Pad, A/B/X/Y/Start/Back/Guide buttons but need three more to complete my arcade stick.
Has anyone attempted this before/are there existing pcb diagrams?
Any help appreciated.
Cheers,
Mark
I can’t give you schematics or labeling on the board but I can give you one critical piece of advice.
Multimeters are your friend on this project.
With a Multimeter you can probe and see if the board common ground or not, and where you can solder too.
If the board is not common ground you will have to wire two wires for every input to there respected switch.
It would also mean not using the 5 pin wireharness for the joystick.
Thanks for the reply Darksakul.
I’m well aware of the need to use a multimeter to probe the pcb to determine the soldering points, it’s just that it can be difficult to keep the unit powered up whilst probing the underside of the PCB. I was hoping someone may have already done so and I could save myself a lot of time.
The board has required two grounds so far, one ground for D-PAD, Back, A/B/X/Y and another ground for Guide/Start. I’ll do up a diagram of what I know so far and add it to the post in case it can help someone else.
A more generic question that people may be able to help me with is…Can the buttons that are used for Left and Right buttons be removed to provide access for soldering to? If so, how does one easily remove the buttons? I’ll search the web myself for this anyway…
post a picture of the pcb. it should be around the same as the old diagram on slagcoin. a multimeter will be your best friend when working with a new pcb like this. most buttons will have just two points save for the L3 and R3 which seemingly have 4 points but 3 are just grounds. you can differentiate them by setting the multimeter to continuity. grounds will be continuous with each other. the other contact point will be the signal by elimination
From what I can see I will have little choice but to remove the left and right triggers to gain access to to spots I need. I was hoping to avoid this.
it may be easier using the hori tekken 6 wireless pcb’s, the 360 ones work without a usb dongle and are pretty cheap
the crappy white stick that came with artbook and game bundle
thats what i will do if i ever get a 360
the triggers are easy enough to remove and should give you more headroom in the case. just hot glue the potentiometers in the neutral position. it should work out ok
Thanks Coffeejuice.
I’ll get back to this thread with pcb photos and diagrams as soon as I get the chance. Busy week.
I haven’t made a lot of progress on this yet, I have worked out that I can power the controller whilst upside down using 5V USB power by cutting a USB cable and attaching to the battery terminals. This will enable me easier access to probe the board whilst it is upside down.
Damn busy life stopping me making arcade sticks!
Here’s what I discovered about the JR9-00012 Xbox 360 Wireless Controller PCB. Simple block diagram. Need two grounds. More to come when I get the time to devote to this.
Here is a marked up diagram of the front of the PCB of the JR9-00012 XBox 360 Controller.
I used three “common” grounds, X, Y and Z (shown in Green). Only need to wire up one ground wire to each and then short the selects (shown in Red) to their matching ground.
After investigation it seems that ground Y can be used for all the buttons marked with X or Y. I didn’t know this until after I’d already wired up. This way works fine though.
Note, I left the triggers in place.
This is the back of the PCB. I only used the Right Analog Click grounded to the first common. That was enough buttons to fill up my arcade stick.
Looking closely at the images I would suggest these are likely solder points for the Left Analog Click and Left Shoulder buttons. I haven’t tested these.
Here is a block diagram showing how I wired up to Joystick and buttons
I hope this can help someone in the future.
I didn’t use the solder points, my soldering guru was happier for me to clean off the contacts with a fibreglass pencil because they provide a nice big soldering surface and we had used them before. The soldering points do look handy though, a shame there are none provided for the left and right shoulder buttons. I would’ve preferred to use them instead of triggers.
Based on my research you can easily get ten buttons without removing the triggers. If you were to remove the triggers you would likely be able to get 13 buttons. (the 10 I got plus left analog click, Left and Right Shoulder buttons).
So after all this hard work, the controllers randomly shut down…seems other devices interfere with them. By reducing the devices in my room I have been able to get better reliability but still have annoying disconnects.
Very disappointing.
My prototype stick uses an older model pcb and doesn’t exhibit the issues. I would suggest steering clear of this model controller for making arcade sticks.
I am now searching for older model joypads on the second hand market to use.
What are the 2 cases you used?
Custom wooden cases for the JR9’s. the prototype in a shoe box.
I kept on troubleshooting my sticks and in the end found out the issue was sloppy wiring (by me).
I had some wires that were crossing each other, they were signal lines grounding to the wrong ground. When this happens it can cause the controller to shut down. I had seen this behaviour when I was probing the pcb for solder points and wiring behaviour.
The funniest thing is, now that I have my sticks functional I realise that this version of the controller has some big advantages over the older models when it comes to hacking. Primarily because the soldering is easier, especially for the D-Pad.
Hopefully this ends a roller coaster ride. Finally I have reliable, wireless arcade sticks.