OK so here are some pics of the Hori Mini wired Gamepad
inside the case
Taken out and I labeled the signal spots just for ease. the other side is obviously the ground.
You can see its pretty much 3 or I guess 5 different boards. Mainboard, analog stick board, Touch panel control board(really weird ill explain below), and the 2 bumper and trigger boards.
closeup of both bumper and trigger boards
they both say the exact same thing, interestingly I don’t see a potentiometer like in normal analog triggers but instead looks to be some kind of analog to digital converter or something. At least that’s what I assume as you can see ADC printed on the PCB.
back of the pad with share and right labeled since they were the only ones without a label. Also touch is not labeled but I didn’t need a solder spot for touch on the back.
points are labeled on both sides(except share I think) but they all look very nice and easy to solder to. Seems nice for dual mods especially because I can solder to both the back and front.
Closeup of the ribbon cable connecting the analog joysticks
also very nicely labeled.
The pad looks easy enough to solder up and its small enough to put into a stick without much trouble especially if you know how to neutralize the pots so you can remove the analog stick board completely. I don’t know how to do that but I am sure some more experienced modders have experience with that.
The triggers actually come up in game controllers on windows as both axis movement and a digital button so I will experiment with removing that whole board and see if the main board sees it as active.
There is a touchpad button and that button works just fine. However this pad also has what they call a touchpad control button( the bottom pcb) and the way it works is you have to press this button for 3 seconds and then click R3 or L3 and once you do that you can use the analog stick of whichever you pressed in order to control touch movement. This is not necessary for sticks but if you wanted it you would need to incorporate the LS or the RS into your stick because dpad wont work for that.
I think that’s all for this pad really and for 20 bucks it seems like a pretty easy pad to put into a stick as long as there are no problems that come up with the triggers when I try to dual mod later on which I will also post follow up to.
EDIT: After some quick tests, you can remove the touch panel control and bumper/trigger boards without any funkyness going on with the main board. I will also update the pic of the back and circle where right and share are as they are not immediately identifiable.
Also the triggers are weird as they activate when connected to power rather than gnd. Can I somehow change this using an inverter chip?
If you can’t change the way the triggers activate then this pad is really only good for 6 button dual mods or sticks where it’s the only pcb. So it works for me for 20 bucks but may not work for all.
**FINAL EDIT: last night I was being a dumb dumb. A simple inverter chip mod with a 74xx04 type chip will work. I messed up last night by soldering to the wrong pins.
All you have to do is
-connect the ADC point from the pcb to pin 14 on the chip
-connect R2 and L2 to pin 2 and 4 on the chip
-connect pin 1 and 3 to their respective buttons
-connect 7 to ground
Now the trigger buttons will activate when shorted with ground just like the other butons.
So this pad in the end is just the same as any pad that needs trigger inverting. A very simple PS4 Pad with a touch pad button for 20 bucks.
**
ANOTHER EDIT: you will also need diodes for this pad if you decide to dual mod it. I will post in a couple days with the diodes installed to give last final edit.
LAST FINAL EDIT
Ok here is the pad in its final form(hmmm playing too much DBFZ). It is currently inside my stick wired to this xbox one controller https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16874822011
Which was bought for 10 bucks.
It has
-Diodes on each button - only needed if you are going to be dual modding it.
-Trigger inverting - only needed if you are going to be using the triggers otherwise you can just use R1 and L1.
-Right Analog stick and Left Analog stick stabilized - only need to do if you want to remove the Left and Right analog stick attached pcb
As you can see the main pcb is actually quite small if you remove the LS and RS board, but in order to do so you need to stabilize the analog stick pots which is actually quite easy.
Here is a closeup of the front main pcb that you have to modify in order to stabilize the pots.
and here is a closeup of the back
You need two 10kohm resistors for this. Other values may work but thats all I had on hand and since they worked I did not measure the range of the pots with a multimeter.
What you are doing is essentially stabilizing the values of the axes between high and low.
In order to do this you connect one of the resistors between the points on the board named V_ctl and LX and the other resistor between the points named GND and RY(see closeup of the front for how I did this)
You then bridge points LX and LY together and RX and RY together. I just used solder for this as the points are so close( you can also see this on the pic with the closeup of the front)
Now to finish all you need to do is bridge LY and RX. I just used a small piece of wire to do this. (see closup of the back). After you bridge those two points you are done and your analog sticks will no longer be floating and randomly going off in every which direction.
Thoughts on this pad.
-Depending on the type of mod and if you have any type of soldering and modding experience then this pad could be a buy over a brook ps3/ps4 board because it is half the price. I recently made my friends some sticks and wish I would have known about the existence of this pad before I had bought two brook boards because that would have saved me just about 50 bucks and I get no extra functionality from the brook than I do this pcb.
-This pad will never have an 8 minute time out with new releases of firmware because it is an officially licensed controller. This is not really a knock against brook though because brook usually has a patch within 24 hours fixing that issue when Sony updates their firmware. Its just something I thought I should add.
-If using for a hitbox this pad may not be a better choice than the brook because it doesn’t have and SOCD cleaner like the brook actually has which means you would have to shell out more money for that functionality.
All in all I am extremely happy with this pad and hope that most of the information in here is coherent enough to follow if you want to do a similar mod
