N64 Controller cracked pcb

[Dr. Dew]

Has anyone ever fixed a cracked pcb for a controller? I have a translucent grape n64 controller that has a crack where the A and B buttons are. These buttons dont work anymore but all the other ones on the controller do.
If anyone knows how to fix the crack so the A and B buttons respond again, I would love some help.

 

[FAST6191]

Cracked PCB is something I at least want to see pictures for. You can fix them but it is not always an easy one, indeed it may be cheaper to buy a new controller or a broken controller you can pull the PCB from if you can't do it for free by yourself. I don't have a controller PCB in front of me at time of writing but I can if needs be, however I am not sure what controller revisions there might have been during the N64 lifetime.

PCBs come in three main flavours as far as this sort of failure is concerned

One sided
Two sided
Multi layer

A cracked PCB tends to mean someone has bent it and it failed, either in compression or in tension depending upon the direction of bending, or both if it had a really fun time first.

One sided is much as it sounds and the sort of thing you get in cheap devices (and a lot of power supplies). Any traces on the top will be easily seen and hopefully easy to test and fix.
Two sided has a front and back layer and things called vias to join them. Still fairly OK to test and fix.
Multi layer (I don't know how many we are up to these days but N64 era is not likely to be too many) is again much as it sounds and there are multiple layers going everywhere and doing all sorts of things. Can be hard to test if you have a broken inner layer, however for low layer counts you often find the inner layers don't have much to them and are often just


Options to fix.
Find and repair any broken traces however you will. When you press buttons you tend to just pull high or pull low a signal. If it is just one path to it then fix that, for both then fix both.

Bypass the area concerned. If you have ever seen something like a rapid fire more or a remapping mod or an external controller mod then you might have seen them not use the buttons but some other area on the PCB. You may indeed have used something like this to fix the actual controller setup above but assuming that is not the case you can use it here. For older devices the buttons go directly to the controller wire so you can go right into those, for newer ones (especially ones like the N64 with analogue sticks) you might have to first find the chip they go into. You then create a new switch above where the old one was, fly the wires to the relevant point/chip and have the button press that instead. Bonus for this is you might even be able to make a clunking micro switch (think mouse button switch) rather than the mushy buttons the N64 had.

 

[Dr. Dew]

Cracked PCB is something I at least want to see pictures for. You can fix them but it is not always an easy one, indeed it may be cheaper to buy a new controller or a broken controller you can pull the PCB from if you can't do it for free by yourself. I don't have a controller PCB in front of me at time of writing but I can if needs be, however I am not sure what controller revisions there might have been during the N64 lifetime.

PCBs come in three main flavours as far as this sort of failure is concerned

One sided
Two sided
Multi layer

A cracked PCB tends to mean someone has bent it and it failed, either in compression or in tension depending upon the direction of bending, or both if it had a really fun time first.

One sided is much as it sounds and the sort of thing you get in cheap devices (and a lot of power supplies). Any traces on the top will be easily seen and hopefully easy to test and fix.
Two sided has a front and back layer and things called vias to join them. Still fairly OK to test and fix.
Multi layer (I don't know how many we are up to these days but N64 era is not likely to be too many) is again much as it sounds and there are multiple layers going everywhere and doing all sorts of things. Can be hard to test if you have a broken inner layer, however for low layer counts you often find the inner layers don't have much to them and are often just


Options to fix.
Find and repair any broken traces however you will. When you press buttons you tend to just pull high or pull low a signal. If it is just one path to it then fix that, for both then fix both.

Bypass the area concerned. If you have ever seen something like a rapid fire more or a remapping mod or an external controller mod then you might have seen them not use the buttons but some other area on the PCB. You may indeed have used something like this to fix the actual controller setup above but assuming that is not the case you can use it here. For older devices the buttons go directly to the controller wire so you can go right into those, for newer ones (especially ones like the N64 with analogue sticks) you might have to first find the chip they go into. You then create a new switch above where the old one was, fly the wires to the relevant point/chip and have the button press that instead. Bonus for this is you might even be able to make a clunking micro switch (think mouse button switch) rather than the mushy buttons the N64 had.

This is the crack. What you think?

Edit: I have seen some videos of people soldering the connections on computer PCB's with copper wiring so ill give it a try on this.
It would be a shame if it can't be repaired because generic n64 controllers are terrible and the real controllers are becoming rarer.

 

[FAST6191]

Good news is that is a single sided board which simplifies matters somewhat.

Bad news is some of the cracks fall in very awkward places. You might think the two thin traces between A and B are not fun and you would be right but I would rather do 50 of those than one of those ones under the black stuff that makes up the contact pad of the switch.

Also I am not sure why more buttons are not working -- several of those look like they should trouble the C buttons and possibly even the start button. There might still be just enough connection though and they could go at any time so do fix them at the same time as the rest of this.

Step 1 is you need to stabilise the board, especially as this board will experience stress when you are pressing buttons and if it still flexes/moves that can make for unreliable buttons which is not fun at all. I don't know how much space there is on the back of the board for this. I would normally see this sort of thing in a power supply, retro keyboard or something big and bulky. That way I can stick a big thick flat sheet of something stiff on the back (another bit of PCB makes a good start) and then start on fixing things. Here though it looks like there was something that pressed under the right hand 0 and that tends to mean a lack of space to do that in. Unless someone dropped a screw or something when reassembling it and it got trapped resulting in that. You could cut down the housing to match the new thickness (looking at step 2 of http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Disassemblereassemble-a-Nintendo-64-Control/ you might not even have to do that), however if you ever do want to replace the PCB with another one it makes life a bit harder as you will have to account for that (just stick another section of something as thick in there, however that is more than replacing the guts of the thing which is screwdriver + whatever you have to do for the analogue stick).

So assuming you stabilised the board I count 6 traces that will definitely need to be repaired and that mess around A could possibly do with a bit more work to be reliable but more on that later.

Picture

Red circles are locations of things needing fixing, blue highlighted section is the ground plane (if you look it comes off the negative of the capacitor at the top of the image, and also matches what you expect on the back side of the image) which does with the switching if you need another point to use. The one running around the outside is positive (it comes off the positive side of the capacitor) so try not to short it out. Just to be painfully obvious the one red circle leading to CD and CR has two traces under it so don't solder all together and treat them as individuals, if you do then pressing one of those will activate both buttons at the same time.

That one next to CL could be no fun at all as there is not much track before the carbon film part. If push comes to shove then you could go from the trace (or possibly that nice test point, the gold pad a bit further back) and snake a wire around the button part to go beyond the first button pad and somewhere in where the CL screen print is.

Everything else standard surface mount soldering fix -- scrape the solder mask off (go towards the crack lest you start lifting traces and that makes things far far harder), bridge with either wire or solder. If it is likely to go back somewhere that conducts (not likely here as it is just a rubber pad above it) then coat it with something which does not. Not liking one of the cracks being on angle but that is nothing major.
Don't worry about that little offshoot that looks like it should be coloured blue -- removing copper is expensive (and they were presumably making millions of these things) so you don't do it where you don't have to.

That mess around A... Everything contains two separate switches so if only one works it should still work. Also it is a carbon film thing so if you have stabilised the back properly then it will hopefully line back up and start conducting (it is a fairly thick layer of carbon compared to the crazy thin copper layers on top of a PCB).
I would not worry about that little cracked off corner from the other side of A.

Good luck and welcome to the world of electronics fixing. You have a nice little starter project here.

 

[The Frenchman]

You can scratch the paint on top of the copper traces and just add solder. This shouldn't be too hard!

 

[Dr. Dew]

Thank you for the input. I will go ahead with what you described and will post an update when I’m done.

 

[The Frenchman]

Thank you for the input. I will go ahead with what you described and will post an update when I’m done.

Don't worry about the carbon covered traces either just scrape and solder too, your controller's conductive pads will work just as well on tin solder as it did on carbon i would glue a piece of thin plastic on the back to strenghten itntoo.