Posted by This past month I acquired two Night Ops Camo Xbox One controllers listed as needs repair on Ebay. One of them tested good and only needed to be cleaned. The other one had a loose part rattling around inside and the left trigger wasn’t working. When I took the controller apart, I found that the thumb stick button retaining clip had come off and was blocking the trigger. I would have to replace the thumb stick, but at least the trigger wasn’t damaged. Since the potentiometers were still good, I transferred them to a new thumb stick that had both pots removed and used on a previous repair. After the thumb stick was replaced, I found that the vertical axis on the right thumb stick wasn’t working. When I removed the stick, I found a crack in the plastic base. There was also a vertical crack on the underside of the circuit board.
I had one other controller that had a similar issue. This most likely a result of dropping the controller and having it land thumb sticks pointing down. I used a multimeter to see if I could find the problem. There were three traces that could have been damaged. On the first one, I tried to repair it by adding a wire from the nearest test point to bridge the cracked trace. This caused Gamepad Tester to not recognize the controller. So, I removed the wire and moved it from the middle pin on the vertical potentiometer to test point #TP65. The vertical axis started working again and all other buttons on the controller were also working. I play tested the controller and did not find any issues.
Another interesting repair was on a USB port that wasn’t working. I needed to somehow test the USB port, so I took an old USB cable and cut the end off so that I could expose the wires. I connected a multimeter to each wire to see if the leads were making contact with the circuit board. I found that lead #1 was not, but the others were good. I used a solder tip that I had modified to a sharp point to add a drop of solder to the lifted lead. It took 3 tries before I got a good connection. I plugged the controller into my computer, and it powered on. The USB connector is a surface mount component with tiny pads. You need a magnifying glass just to see them. I was glad that I was able to make this repair which I had previously thought was beyond my capabilities.