Hey all! Well as many of you know, I have an xbox one, and have had the issue of controller drift on one of my controllers. Being the Lance that I am, I decided to tear down the controller, desolder the parts from the board, and determine what was going wrong with the controller. Now, this job required a bunch of troubleshooting, and desoldering, and inspection of the pieces. My question to yall, is whether anybody would be willing to help me possibly with posting a teardown, or something on some website. Not sure whether here would be the best idea (not that I am opposed to a fun 'tech' teardown here) However having the ability to know this information, and potentially help others having the same issue is something I always enjoy. So, my questions are... anybody know of some 'tech' website that we could do some sort or article/pictures/how-t0 that shows this work? This may need to be updated as the parts come in the mail. Also, I have not seen this information elsewhere on the net, other than 'buy part and replace'. I have found nothing that shows exactly what has failed, and showing potentially why it has failed. As this seems to be a common occurrence with xbox one controllers, I would imagine that it may have the potential to help many. So... any takers willing to help out?!?!? Thanks! ~HL54
iFixit is a goldmine if one is determined to fix their own things. https://www.ifixit.com/Device/Xbox_One_Wireless_Controller Hopefully they have something relevant.
Thanks jkjkjk182! It is a nice place to see how you can tear down the controller, however I actually have already done that, desoldered the thumbstick assembly off of the board, disassembled the potentiometers off of the board, and have opened up the potentiometer to see what the exact cause was of that "drift". What I found out, is that on each side of the wheel within the potentiometer, there are two curved 'hooks' that ride the surface of the dial type potentiometer. On the problematic one, one side has worn so thin, it actually broke the 'hook' in half, and that loose piece was causing 'contact' to be made in the potentiometer, causing erroneous signals to be given to the controller board, thus the 'drift' in the controller. This begs the question, as to why one side of this potentiometer has failed in this way. It appears that over time, for whatever reason, just normal use of the controller would wear down the metal within to the point where it becomes very thin, and will either break, or deform causing failure. In addition, while it is rumored to be a 10k potentiometer (5k per side, for 10k in total) I have not soldered leads to give it my own testing for verification. Now one can purchase new assemblies from various sources (I have a few shipping from amazon) however to maintain the original parts of the controller, I plan to remove the potentiometer from the new and put it on the old assembly. In addition, I am having a really hard time sourcing just the potentiometer that would go on the assembly. If people only require a cheap cheap potentiometer, no need to spend 8 bucks for the entire thing, as compared to the cost of a potentiometer. I will try to post a picture or two up once I get my phone to be recognized as a storage device... It is being difficult at the moment...
