Saturday 2 November 2013

Xbee 360 Controller - Xbox 360 Controller and Xbee - Wiring

So I've recently fractured my heel, so I have a lot of time on my hands at the moment for projects. For my latest one I have decided to re-purpose a soon to be obsolete Xbox 360 controller as a mulitpurpose wireless controller for electronic projects using an Arduino and Xbee.

The idea is pretty simple, wire all the input sensors on the Xbox 360 controller to the analog and digital pins on an Arduino, then broadcast the values of those sensors from an Xbee to another Xbee using serial.

To start this off, connections had to be physically made to all buttons and potentiometers in the controller, here are the connections:




The wiring took a fair while as there is not a lot of room inside the controller once put back together, so every wire and it's placement had to be planned.

First the triggers had to be removed, as there are two pins underneath the plastic housings.
To remove these, the potentiomer for each trigger had to be desoldered

Carefully placing the wires so as not to obstruct any buttons or plastic casing when put back together

  


A dremel was required to make room for the wires underneath the trigger housings


Not included in the picture outlining the buttons, I have added wires to the battery terminals for power.
After taking this picture, I noticed I had forgotten to wire the left thumb button - which was then soldered on

Back to together, there is a perfect amount of space for all the ribbon cable to come out the back
Of course, I took note of what each wire was connected before reassembling the controller.

Coming up next, connecting to an Arduino and transmitting over Xbee