Picked this up at Wal-Mart yesterday for 14.95 USD. It’s a (new?) Sony-branded budget PS2 controller without rumble motors. I haven’t seen this before and couldn’t find any existing info on it. Besides the missing motors it’s somewhat different internally than previous DS2 pads I’ve seen.
Cracking the case open reveals a couple interesting things. Holsters for the rumble motors are present but empty, and the ribbon cable from the button membrane is no longer directly attached to the PCB.
The ribbon ‘cable’ is loosely held in place by 2 plastic standoffs jutting through the PCB, but no real contact is made until the controller casing is screwed closed. There’s a gray rubberized pad opposite the PCB-to-ribbon contacts that is pressed tightly against the PCB when the case is sealed, completing the circuit.
Kind of a neat idea I guess. Annoying if you were intending to keep the circuit sheet attached to the PCB after removing it from the case. There is a resistor in-line with the circuit sheet between the d-pad/button common and one of the PCB contacts (same as the DS2), so if you remove it you’ll need to wire one back in.
The actual button contacts have been moved from directly underneath each button to behind the printed circuit sheet; now contact is made by mashing the button membrane into the sheet, which in turn presses down into the contact pad.
The PCB itself looks pretty typical aside of the ribbon contact area.
Btw, does anyone know offhand what value the resistor is in the button-facing circuit sheet on the DS2? The ones on the sixaxis are supposed to be 4.7k, but I’m getting over 6 on my cheap multimeter, so I don’t trust what I’m seeing for this pad.
Ah, cool, I didn’t know the ribbons were like that in any DS2s. The last one I bought had soldered-through contacts, and before that all my DS2s had a slide-in receptacle on the PCB like the sixaxis.
They might be producing lower-cost peripherals for the PS2 because it’s going to be their budget system for a while.
Yeah, it looks like it can run them. It has pin 3 (+9v) present like the DS1/DS2, and I see the voltage jump at the M1/M2 sets of contacts (where the motors would connect) when vibration is active in-game.
That’s funny. I just so happened to need a new PS2 controller and I have a grip of old rumble motors from stick projects. I think I’ll put 2 and 2 together.
If it matches the DS2 dev measured out for me, you need about a 5k ohm. Wire up eash direction/button to the obvious line, daisy chain a common line like you normally would for a common ground setup, but instead of connecting it to ground, you connect it to the resistor, and the other end fo the resistor goes to the VCC line.
But, unless you tackle it with a multimeter, noone can say with 100% certainty
ok… I think I undersand after researching “analog theory” on that site. so there is pretty much NO ground like im used to dealing with in the traditional digital pads, it’s been replaced by the power source or “vcc line” as you stated above right? But this means that the resistor would have to be “EXACTLY” right or there will be dire consequences
^^It will be as soon as I get a home in on which resistors should go with it
I tested the resistor on the plastic and I got 8.7k, can anyone confirm this number?
picking these up from walmart would be much easier than hunting them down on ebay
Ha! I found some of these on a business trip in a podunk Oklahoma wal-mart last week, thought I had stumbled onto a joystick-mod goldmine. Glad to see they’re not as rare as I had thought. I picked up two just for the heck of it.
BTW, that I found wal-mart was selling them for $10 a pop, weird there was a price difference.
Hope these are as easy to hack as it seems, I’ll definitely be buying more, if only to have PS2 Sony-Brand PCBs for mods, if they are.
