One Handed NES Controller: Desoldering

And so it begins! Here is the first blog post about the One Handed NES Controller ! First we start off examining the controller. Now, what we need off of the controller board is two things, the 4021 Shift register (the heart of the controller) and the cable that goes from the NES to the controller. That one chip, the shift register I spoke of, that's the thing that takes the buttons signals, condenses them down and sends it down the wires in the actual cord which then gets interpreted by the NES and in turn, makes Mario jump and makes Simon Belmont whip the crap out of Dracula. 

We need to remove the components that I mentioned above, so we can re-purpose them in the one handed controller. I only need these two components because the rest will be replicated elsewhere but for the controller to work, I'll need both of these. I fired up my de-soldering iron and soldering iron and got to work!

  

Once I've successfully desoldered all of the pins on the chip, I wanted to make sure that all the pins on the chip were broken free from any solder left inside the holes. So, I took my spudger (a tool that's wonderfully handy for prying things) that I picked up from ifixit.com and pushed the pins slightly until I felt them move slightly.

Once that was done I had to take the other end of my spudger and push the chip out of the holes as seen in the picture below. 

I'm free!

Now on to the cable! I pretty much have to do the same thing desolder the pins then pull them out. I had to use a small pair of needle nose pliers to pull the pins out of the holes.

And that's that! With the cable and chip desoldered we can start building the prototype for testing! Unfortunately that will have to be another post however I did start soldering wires onto the actual mini-joystick that will replace the D-Pad. I chose the mini-joystick because it could easily be actuated with one hand just like a normal analog stick. I also chose it because it's a 5-way mini-joystick, which means that not only is there an up, down, left and right but there is also a center click which is where I will either place the start button or select button. So here are a couple pictures of that. 

                                           

I used ribbon cable (yes old ribbon cable is still extremely useful) to bring out the pins on the mini-joystick.

And here it is all soldered up!

Well stay tuned for the next post. There'll be a video of me playing a game with a breadboard prototype of the actual unit.