Competition Pro Hilarious FAIL & fix

[Jedi Master Thrash]

Competition Pro Hilarious FAIL & fix

I'm going through all my "fail" controllers and accessories right now to see which ones I can repair and resell at the gaming convention. Most failures are simple. A little eraser or lube is all they need.

However, I have this one controller, a Competition Pro Series III by Honey Bee, No. SG-18

A couple D-Pad directions weren't working right, so I cracked 'er open. And to my surprise, look what I found:

*FAIL*!!!

They designed the D-Pad wrong initially. They made the PCB pads into a square-pattern instead of the proper diamond slot formation.

They they obviously discovered their mistake, and designed that thin PCB overlay that fixes the problem. The PCB overlay has 5 solder vias to connect the new buttons to the old buttons.

Unfortunately, the solder joints holding the PCB overlay to the main board weren't very strong. Probably bending of the PCB caused two of them to pop off.

To fix it I just hotwired the vias over to the PCB traces using short pieces of wire.

Works now. But I just think it's funny to see a really bad FAIL for the original PCB layout, and a hack-job to fix it up before shipping the product.

 

[ExCyber]

Competition Pro Hilarious FAIL & fix

I don't think I've seen anything quite that flagrant before. I've seen quite a few things with resistors and capacitors that obviously weren't designed into the layout, though. I've even seen a very obvious jumper wire on a PCI card. I think the reason for it is that even though a PCB is relatively cheap, redoing an entire run is somewhat costly and (perhaps more importantly) delays the launch of the product.

 

[Jedi Master Thrash]

Competition Pro Hilarious FAIL & fix

Just to be clear, the jumper wires were my repair. The PCB overlay was their hackjob fix.

The PCB was secured with solder vias. But the solder vias weren't stable with respect to board torque, and broke. So I had to add the jumpers to fix it.