Logitech f310 Gamepad Repair

[DakotaSamuel]

As I am sure a lot of teams have noticed, a common problem with the Logitech gamepads is that some will develop a problem where they will intermittently loose connection. We have three of these controllers, and this happened to one a year ago, and another one recently (during a competition ). I repaired the first broken one when it stopped functioning correctly and it has been working fine ever since. I figured I could post the process I went through to fix the controller to maybe help other teams that are having the same problems.

The most common issue I have found is a short in the cable that develops near the stress relief where the USB cable enters the controller. The goal of this repair is to remove this bad section of the cable and rewire everything with cable from farther up which is above where the short was. When it is all finished everything looks almost exactly as it did before.

Tools needed:

• soldering iron
• hot-glue gun
• small phillips screwdriver
• sharp knife
• lighter (optional)

Instructions:
Because of the image limit I am just putting the link to each image below each step. There is also a gallery with step by step instructions here.

1. Remove the 7 screws on the back of the gamepad and pull the two halves of the controller apart. Be careful not to tip it right side up as there are loose buttons on the top half of the shell that will fall out.
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2. Remove the 5 screws that hold the circuit board in place. Note the silver one in the middle. Remove the loose board.
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3. Using a sharp knife, cut the cable relief along the middle seam and remove it.
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4. Cut the USB cable a couple of inches above where the cable relief was. The short in the cable is most commonly right above the cable relief so this should be past it. It is a good idea to test with a multimeter to be sure. There should be no connection between the outside shield and any of the inside wires. If there is, the short is somewhere else in the cable.
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5. Remove the old wire connections from the circuit board. For each wire touch the hot soldering iron to the connection point and pull the wire away. Repeat for all of the wires.
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6. Remove the ferrite bead from the old cable.
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7. Remove the rubber shielding up to 2-1/2" from the end of the good piece of USB cable.
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8. Separate the wires and cut away the foil. Be sure not to cut the shielding wires, just the foil. Strip the ends off of the colored wires. I find that for small wires like this it works well to just run a lighter under the end for a few seconds and then pull then melted plastic off. If you don't want to play with fire though, the wire strippers will probably work.
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9. Hot-glue the two halves of the cable stress relief back on to the cable 2-3/4" from the where the rubber shielding ends. Re-add the wires through the ferrite bead.
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10. Solder the wires back on to their connection points on the circuit board. At this point I like to plug the controller in to a computer to test if it will connect. If it does, then everything is going well so far. If not, then there is some troubleshooting to do.
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11. Insert the cable stress relief into the slot on the shell, and route the cable through the guides.
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12. Make sure the mode selector switch on the bottom of the shell and the switch underneath the board are both pushed in the same direction. Put the board into place on the shell and insert the screws. It may take some wiggling to get the board to lay flat. Do not force it. Often the triggers will get caught on the shell and pressing them will help.
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13. With the top half of the controller shell facing down, lay the assembled bottom half into it. Again, it should go together fairly easily without much force. Wiggling the joysticks can help. Also, taping the side hand grip pieces into place during this process is a good idea since they tend to fall out while trying to coax the halves together. When the two halves have been assembled, screw them together. Test the controller again, and give yourself a high-five when it works!
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That is all. When this repair is completed the gamepad should be just like new, but no better. This means that it is still susceptible to this happening again in the future. My guess is that the leading cause of this issue is how the controller is often put away. This is often done by wrapping the cable around the controller. The cable is usually wrapped too tightly, which puts strain on the cable right above the strain relief (which really is actually quite bad at it's job). The best way to prevent this issue from happening again is to wrap the cable around the controller more loosely with the first loop to avoid putting to much strain on that area of the cable.

Hope this helps someone!


-DakotaSamuel

[FTC5414]

Very nice tutorial! Thanks for sharing!