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In the year 2000, Ben Heckendorn built his first mod.
“Ben: We can rebuild it smaller, better, portable.”
Since then, he has continued his working helping those in need with creating new projects. If you’ve got an idea you’d like to see built, why not send it to The Ben Heck Show.
“Ben: Hello and welcome to the all new Ben Heck Show, where we build cool projects based off community suggestions. I am your host, Benjamin J. Heckendorn. You might remember me from such projects as Bill Paxton Pinball or the X-Box 360 laptop. In each episode of the show we are going to take a viewer request and then build it. This will be known as the Viewer Challenge.
We will also be doing larger projects along the way that can’t be finished in the course of a single episode. These will be called the Big Builds, and we will cover those as we go along. The first Big Build we are going to tackle is an X-Box 360 laptop. Stay tuned later for details on how you can enter for a chance to win it, once it’s completed.”
“Ben: Our first Viewer Challenge comes from Dan Bertholomey who writes: Hello Sir, my name is Dan Bertholomey, and I was injured in a hit and run that has left me without the use of my right hand, and I can’t imagine life without my X-Box 360. I’m very interested in purchasing a one-handed controller. Let me know what I can do, and thank you for all you do. God Bless. That should be easier than falling off a log in the rain, now I will go call Dan and brainstorm what he needs.”
“Dan: Hi Ben, thanks for calling.”
“Ben: No problem, thanks for submitting your request.”
“Dan: I need to figure out a way to play without using my right arm. I can’t imagine not being able to play videogames anymore.”
“Ben: Foot pedals to take over some of the functions?”
“Dan: Yeah, definitely – I was doing some thought on that and you could even have say one pedal, the right pedal kind of mimic the controller Y, A, B, and X buttons. Like have a four-way pedal, you know?”
“Ben: Okay, I will write that down - a four-way pedal. Holding this controller in my left hand I can do left control stick, left bumper and the left trigger, and the D pad. So what I think we should mostly think about is moving right trigger, right bumper, A, B, X, Y, and the right analog stick. Now, one thing I have done in the past with the secondary analog stick is I stick it to the bottom of the controller. One of them, so you activate the other analog stick by pushing the controller against your knee, and then you move the controller against your knee and that moves the analog stick. Does that make sense?”
“Dan: The new Madden comes out August 15th.”
“Ben: Okay, I don’t think we will have any problem getting it done by then.”
“Dan: I am originally from Chicago so, I knew that would ruin the deal if I mentioned that. You know how that is with the Packers and the Bears.”
“Ben: Well, the Bears haven’t really been a threat in quite a while, so I don’t know if it is much of a war anymore. Okay, well I think I have enough information here to get started. So, I will keep you posted on the build and we will get this out to you as soon as we can.”
“Dan: I just want to thank you, seriously – from the bottom of my heart for what you’re doing for me.”
“Ben: One thing you want to look for when you are modifying an X-Box 360 controller is this little plus and minus sign inside the battery compartment. It is clearly visible. This indicates that this is a modern X-Box controller, not one of the older X-Box 360 controllers which had two different connections per button, and were a lot harder to wire up. These newer controller are very simple, it’s just signal and ground per button and it is a lot easier to work with. Okay, well we have an X-Box 360 controller here. First thing to think about is the fact that it has these little security screws.
Just get a really small flathead screwdriver and it will allow you to just kind of slip in the side of the security pin and remove the screws anyway. Well, so much for security. On all X-Box controllers it is pretty common – there is a signal line and a ground for each one of the buttons. So, we are just going to use an X-Acto knife and go side by side using the flat of the blade on these little pads to reveal copper. You basically just need enough to solder to. That is something else we can do in here, we can scratch off one of the bottom pads, so we have a ground connection. So we add a little bit of solder to the points we want to disconnect, which helps the solder re-flow and then we can remove it with the de-soldering iron. The de-soldering iron is pretty simple, it’s just a 40-watt iron with a suction bulb. So you push out all the air, put it down over the part, swirl it around – let it heat up, and thwump, it sucks up all the solder.
It makes that noise too, thwump, thwump. We can repeat the procedure for the right analog stick, just heat up all of the connections with some more solder. A good sign that you have de-soldered something correctly is that you can see black expanse around the pins. So that shows you that they are ready to go. Also, if you can move the pins with a screwdriver, that also means you probably de-soldered. And, once you’ve got the piece de-soldered, go ahead and just stick a screwdriver in and whook – pop it off. To connect the wires going to the pedals, we are going to use something called a header. Now this is a point 1 inch header, which means it is point 1 inch between each pin. It is a pretty common size.
The other common size is a 2mm pin header, which is slightly smaller. Now, this header has 8 pins, which should be enough because we have A, B, X, Y, right bumper, ground, voltage and then trigger sense. So, this 8 pin header will cover it all. So, what we are going to do here is cut off enough of this ribbon cable so we can attach it to this. I really like to use an X-Acto knife to do this – you take the X-Acto knife and cut between them. That way you get an accurate count. You know, someone might say you should be wiser to your teeth - that’s terrible. How could you do such a thing? But in reality, it’s not nearly as bad for your teeth as drinking soda, or forgetting to floss. Alright, now that we have the header connected, we are going to stick it right here on the circuit board. So what I am going to do is take my Dremel, scuff up the bottom of it, then use our good – good friend super glue. A little dab will do you, but a big dab will really do you.
Then we basically go – squeck. Alright, so now we have attached the header and all the wires to the buttons. As you can see here, the wires have been soldered in the order in which they came off the header – which just makes it looks nicer and also makes it flatter and more compact. We have written down what the pin-out is so we will remember it later after we have closed up the controller. That’s enough for now, I have to take a break.”
“Ben: Now we are going to take a quick break from the Viewer Challenge and start on the Big Build. As I had mentioned earlier, we will be modifying an X-Box 360 into a laptop which we will be giving away to one lucky viewer, once it’s complete. Visit my page on element14.com for more details. Okay, let’s get started. I am here with my friend, Kurt Kressin.”
“Kurt: Hello.”
“Ben: Who is going to help me disassembling this new X-Box 360. We don’t need this.”
“Kurt: Here we go.”
“Ben: Look at that thing.”
“Kurt: Wow.”
“Ben: Ohhh, alright how do you think we should take this thing apart? Let’s take the hard-drive out first.”
“Kurt: Nice.”
“Ben: Smells new, I like it.”
“Kurt: I feel like these chrome ends would come off.”
“Ben: Oh yeah, maybe there are tabs.”
“Kurt: Oh yeah, that feels loose. Oh, look at that.”
“Ben: Oh, oh.”
“Kurt: There we go.”
“Ben: We’ve got this guy.”
“Kurt: Yeah buddy.”
“Ben: It’s a good thing they put vent holes in this X-Box.”
“Kurt: It’s going to start sweating pretty soon.”
“Ben: That’s true, it’s going to make you sweat like C &C Music Factory.”
“Kurt: Yeah, buddy. There are some electronics there.”
“Ben: That is the WiFi Module. Look how easily they can make an X-Box version without the WiFi insert, very easily.”
“Kurt: Nice, the face-plate is removable after all.”
“Ben: It is handy the way that all connects to the ring-of-light. Less wiring later on, Oh, there it is.”
“Kurt: Wow.”
“Ben: Look at that nice fan.”
“Kurt: Holy cow.”
“Ben: All SATA drive connectors, so that’s nice. We can just use SATA connectors to hook up the hard-drive. It will be a lot simpler. As usual, this is held in with mechanical retention. It’s cheaper than screws. Yep, so these are attached to some of the components. In order to get the bottom RFC Shield off, we have to release these. This thing should…”
“Kurt: Drop right out.”
“Ben: Stop, drop and roll. This is the power for the DVD, oh – it is held in place with tape. Nice.”
“Kurt: Double stick tape, got to love it. Oh, look at that heat-sync.”
“Ben: Oh yeah, and it’s nice and flat which means it will be easy to make this into a portable. It may seem like I am rough with this stuff, but I am also gentle. There it is. The X Clamp – it’s back. Alright, so now that we have the X-Box all apart – you see how this is a nice little fan assembly, like why change it? I am just going to leave that fan assembly as is and change all the parts around it. If this is the user over here, put the disc drive here, put the hard drive here – kind of like how it was originally. Put some circuitry here, put the power supply brick here. Can you kind of picture that?”
“Kurt: Nice, do you need to have the shroud around the fan to point the air in a certain direction?”
“Ben: Well, I don’t think so. The fan already has like a wall around it, I think that should be good. But I will put alternate air holes in it, so the air can come in all sorts of directions and be spit out this way. It will be a lot like the PlayStation 3 slim laptop I made. Well, we have gotten everything taken apart – so I guess the next step will be to design it into the computer and make a case around it.”
“Ben: Okay, we’re back. Now, we’ve gotten most of the internal circuitry for the single handed controller down. So the next thing to do is think about the foot pedal. We will start with the left foot, it is going to have two functions. It is going to have right trigger, which is going to be this. And then there is going to be a thing up here, which you push your foot up to click for right bumper. Okay, now the right analog trigger is analog and how it appears in the 360 is you have a potentiometer like this – the trigger is here. So basically, when you push the trigger, the potentiometer rotates this way. And on a potentiometer, you’ve got the wiper and then the two poles.
This one goes to ground and this one goes to a voltage – it is called VCC. So what we can do to simulate this trigger being pushed is we can short out these two things. So basically it will be like Pow – all the way over. So we will attach those to a switch that will be this switch right here. Okay, let’s move on to the right foot. Okay, so you’ve got a pedal here. Now that is going to be the easiest pedal to push, so we are going to make that the most common button – A. Then flanking it will be two side pedals, here and here. And that will be X and B. Now as you can see this is shaped like the quadrant buttons on the X-Box 360. Finally, there will be a top pedal portion here which will be Y and we will put that up the same way as we did the right bumper on the other controller.
Alright, we start out by making an outline around the feet so we have an idea of where we are going to put things. We can kind of test the concept with a shoe here. Yeah, that seems to work. Then we lay down a strip of wood, this allows the small of the feet to rest on it so you can click in with your toes on the snap-action switches. We put these up here at the tip so the pieces of aluminum which will act as the pedals will push down on them. But first, there is a spring to give it a little more force and tension. That way its not too easy to click it. Then we add some felt to the aluminum pieces and stick it in place, which gives it a nice soft feel. Also, it makes it look better than a piece of wood. This is left and right, and you know you have to take a break every so often and play videogames. Make sure that everything is working. Ohh, nice pass. Okay, when you click up you hit that snap action as you can see there.
There are left and right side switches, as we described for X and B. As you can see we have all the switches here, so we are ready to move on. Here is where the switches plug into the controller. That way you can detach it with ease. There is also another button here for the left bumper. Okay, so basically we are changing the position of the analog stick. So we have to make sure all the pin-outs are the same. As long as we keep track of them, we should be good. We’ve got ground, wiper and VCC for each of the directions – up and down, X and Y. Then we just solder all the connections in place and use some heat-shrink tubing to keep it isolated. Okay, with the controller done I am going to take it over to my friend, Jones’ house, so I can test it out before I ship it to Dan. Jones.”
“Jason: Yes.”
“Ben: I am here to show you how this works.”
“Jason: What is that and how did it get into my living room in the first place?”
“Ben: It found a way.”
“Jason: Man the Jets aren’t messing around here today.”
“Ben: We’ve got to get rid of it quick.”
“Jason: You just lob it out to the B guy.”
“Ben: Okay. B – oh.”
“Jason: Oh, you waited too long.”
“Ben: Oh, he got it. That was a good call Jones.”
“Jason: Yeah, that Jets guy is just horrible though.”
“Ben: Well we made it through my first episode and I still have all 10 fingers. Join us next time when we build a portable CNC machine and start designing the shell for the X-Box 360 laptop. See you then.”
The Ben Heck Show was made possible by our sponsors at element 14. For more information on all my projects and for a list of all the parts I used today – visit element14.com. Visit their community and The Ben Heck Show group using the URL below. Join me there to get more details about a chance to win the X-Box 360 laptop we are building. We will see you next time.