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| Power A Pro Wireless Controller for the PS3 being repaired |
We all love to play our videogames but we hate when parts of our game system get damaged and fail to operate correctly. One for the worst damages you can have with your game system would be that of the game controller or gaming pad. The items drive and control your games. You're dead without them well unless you have a motion gaming system like the Xbox 360 Kinect or the PlayStation Move systems. Unfortunately not every game uses those functions and not every game is meant to be played via a motion system.
Over the weekend one of my controllers fell victim at the hands of my brother by way of button mashing. Button mashing sucks because the buttons on a controller take a huge beating. Actually the button themselves don't take the brunt of the beating by a gamer's fingers. It the touch point padding underneath that take the major damage. When that happens your buttons on your game pad become dull and worn out. You'll notice that they don't have the same bounce to them like they did before. They sink down into the bedding of the controller and they won't rise up.
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| Button padding from Power A Pro Wireless PS3 controller |
This padding sits underneath the game pads buttons and top of each designated button sensor on the circuit board. When you hit a button on the controller the padding, the black nodes you see, touch its designated button sensor which sends a message to your console which determines which button is pressed. The padding is completely made of rubber and is soft to the touch. The particular piece of padding you see came out of my Power A Pro Wireless controller for my PS3. The padding for the triangle button was damaged so I took it out to replace it.
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| Button padding for Pro A Wireless circuit board |
The problem with this situation was that I didn't have padding that exactly fit my particular controller. In the picture you see there are only three black rubber nodes. I cut the fourth one out which was damaged. I then cut another piece of padding from an old Xbox 360 controller that I had to make it fit but the button pressure was off and in the end my triangle button on the PS3 got stuck. Then I used another controller in this picture here:
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| My old Interact Propad 8 controller |
This is my old Interact Propad 8 controller. This was made before PCs started using controllers with dual analog sticks. I don't even remember when I got it. I think it was sometime around 2002. So I decided to take it apart to see what pieces I could use to repair my Power A Pro Wireless PS3 controller. This is what I found:
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| Propad 8 dissassembled |
What you see on the left are individual rubber pads for the ProPad 8 digital controller. The padding for the right is for the controller's D-Pad. It looks similar to the padding that I had in my Power A Pro Wireless controller but it doesn't exactly fit. The green pads are the ones that I was hoping that I would find. These work great for my controller. I like these better because they fit individually into each button space and I don't have to worry about doing any resizing to make them fit. They also provide good balance and bounce for your controller. You'll get a much lighter feel to the buttons but the controller will remain sturdy and not loose in side your controller. Here's another picture:
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Top and bottom of green pads
So what I did was that I took the green padding and placed them in my button spaces for my Power A Pro Wireless controller. |
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| Green pads placed inside Power A Pro Wireless casing |
As you can see the pads fit with my Power A Wireless controller perfectly. They individually fit in each space allowing for perfect placement with the button sensors on the circuit board.
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The finished product
And voila! Here's the final product. This was really an easy fix. I took the pictures while I was repairing it yesterday morning. This keeps me from having to go and spend another $40 on yet another controller. I've already been through so many. I'm always taking stuff apart trying to rebuild and fix them. I've been pretty good at it over the years too. I'm such a gear head. Now if you're thinking about fixing your own controllers you don't have to go fishing for an old controller to get those rubber pads. You can find them easily on Ebay. They're really cheap. Ok, now its time to get back to playing Madden! lol |
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