I bought 9 PS3 controllers for $40... how bad could they be?

foreign on my channel recently I was fixing three PS3s that I got 50 bucks but there was kind of a side note to that that none of those PS3s came with a controller now that's okay if I just use them as backup machines but if I wanted to give one to a friend or sell them not being able to provide a controller is kind of a hard sell sadly I don't just have three PS3 controllers sitting around so I decided to buy exactly that this is actually eight controllers five of them I think are genuine and three of them are generic actually it looks like four of them are genuine and this one is the Imposter you sussy Barker they might have written in the listing that it was five genuine and not been able to tell that this was double shock three double shock I mean close enough in the vein of good deals for low money all eight of these were forty dollars so that's five dollars per controller one of these working is like what at least twenty dollars on eBay so getting eight controllers for the price of two I reckon that's pretty good now they were sold to me as untested which obviously means they don't work to help me keep track of which ones are which I'm going to label them a through H and write down any faults that I discover oh wait oh wow there are nine here no it says eight they're actually nine five of them are genuine one is a sassy Sunday and three are just generics these are probably and I'm not saying this to be rude worth absolutely nothing but hey I'm always gonna need a controller to give to a friend no they can't have any of these they're only only one of these all right let's start with this it has on it does not turn on I'll be the judge of that let her rip I mean you're seeing that right it literally says does not turn on bruh what do you call that all right as far as I can tell all the buttons are working there is something a little odd about the thumb sticks it's like they're a little loose or at least the left one is the right one actually that might be fine but you can even see on the left one there's this like gap between the thumbstick and the casing that should never be there in fact I'm just seeing now look at that there's this like imprint that the left thumb stick is made which it never should be doing that that's a weird one but I mean as far as does not turn on goose I'm calling that a win I'll make a little a for a piece of sticker paper it even runs on battery I could maybe believe this does not turn on message if maybe its battery was cooked or something but no moving on does not connect well we'll plug it in so the computer seems to have picked up on it but it does indeed not seem to be connecting what a funny issue that seems like almost a firmware issue I've never seen a firmware issue on a controller before then again maybe it's just the PS button doesn't work and you need the PS button for it to select player one does this work wirelessly I'm gonna say that's inconclusive it might just be low on battery but so far it is not powering on from the button then again if my armchair hypothesis that the PS button is simply broken then it wouldn't turn on from doing that either this is B this is actually correct does not connect this one is not labeled at all literally not at all not even a the sticker on the back I don't think that's a good sign I'm gonna guess that it's not gonna turn on at all oh okay the S button all right oh interesting all buttons and triggers seem to be good both thumbsticks are a bit wacky though even when extending them all the way it's a little fidgety well this gets C the six axis what do we got ah ah seems pretty dead I thought this would happen eventually though oh never mind I don't know what happened the first time maybe the plug just wasn't in all the way triggers are good buttons are good thumbsticks uh they feel disgusting you can practically see the sheen on this one the right one seems to be working fine the left one though it's actually like kind of stuck up look at that this might be the grossest one so far it's just greasy and sticky all over I'm gonna guess that's probably its issue as well someone poured some Sunny D into it or some okay so this is Unit D second six axis what do we got here oh okay working this left thumb stick similar issue but towards the bottom right again this might be another situation of it's just dirty and sticky it also wouldn't surprise me if both 6-axis controllers maybe came from the same household and so they uh exhibited the same behavior but seems otherwise pretty much functional unit e yeah I'm really becoming discount Markiplier now let's try The Sassy Barker I don't know man uh-huh well that's interesting I guess Light number three is out R1 seems to be stuck in a little bit you see that that's probably fixable that's probably just a matter of opening this up and realigning it oh what the what the hell is going on here this has got to be a mapping problem like I'm pressing the triggers and the thumb sticks are going up and down up and down is mapped to the left trigger right up and down seems to be also mapped to to left and right look the double Shock 3 is full of surprises all right well this quite appropriately I'm gonna say gets an F onto the generics oh God the USB plug is upside down why would you do that okay two of the lights are out it would seem hold button to power on Jesus Christ do they think that little of me have a diagram on this controller also it does not actually appear to work my note for this is does not connect really condescending what do you got for us KMD whoa oh well I think I found the problem I was gonna say impressive that it runs off standard batteries apparently and then I remembered what standard batteries are like okay yeah let's get those out oh God [Music] ew after that disaster let's check out Niko oh this comes with the USB built in I'm gonna guess that means that it's not wireless at all so I've plugged it in did you see the testing thing just went white hang on unplug that I'll go back in press a button what am I to believe this thing is so shitty that it crashes the whole website oh oh no these are up they're really creaky like it's hard to actually push them the way you want to go because they kind of want to go different ways it's like really ratchety and listen to the noise it makes and also this this thumbstick literally won't go in that direction I don't know why but like it'll go in all this direction and as soon as you get to there it stops this is awful it's just bad but you know what I don't think that's a bad haul I think out of the five official controllers I'd be betting that most if not all of those could make a full recovery some of the generics I think could but whether it's going to be worth it I don't know but I'll see what I can do [Music] Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for creating a beautiful and professional looking website with no hassle if you're looking to start a business blog online store or really 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trying to think practically I mean if I wanted generics I could spend less than nine dollars each including shipping on brand new ones from eBay so if the time or money I have to spend to fix any one of those is worth more than that I just don't consider it worth my time I decided to start with controller C this is the one with the jittery thumbsticks for whatever reason it felt like it was going to give me the least amount of trouble immediately I discovered something I didn't notice before the USB plug is actually slightly broken you can see if I fiddle with this cable enough eventually it loses connection and if you actually look closely at the plug itself you can see a tiny little chunk of plastic has cracked off I don't know how that would have happened I guess someone was just a little rough with it while it was plugged in I don't actually think I'm going to take the time to fix it now simply because this is predominantly a wireless controller and it isn't really an issue if I leave it alone while charging if it does become a problem later though it should be pretty simple to replace the plug with a new one as the power of using standard plugs like this Nintendo anyways I took it apart removed the old gross thumbsticks and had a good look to see if anything was wrong from the outside it seemed fine which is probably to be expected I plugged the controller in again to get a better look at the problem only to find that it fixed itself yeah no more jittering the movement was now totally fluid weird I mean I didn't even do anything yet my guess is the jittering was caused by just a tiny bit of dirt lodged in here and the jostling everything around while opening managed to dislodge it so I decided to give everything a real nice clean including inside the joystick with some alcohol and as far as I can tell that's all it took I tested the controller for a few hours and there was no sign of any joystick problem at all you know this is always the best kind of repair when it turns out all you needed to do was just open it up and clean it since so many of these had gross sticky thumbsticks I bought a pack of Replacements they came in a pack of 10 which is coincidentally exactly how many I needed to replace the thumbstick clicks on all five controllers now these feel much better along with the cleaning I did they basically feel like new I think I'll call this one done one down eight more to go next I took a look at controller B this is the one that would power on but not actually start playing and this one too I thought was likely to be easy because I suspected it was just a broken PS button unfortunately while opening it up I accidentally broke part of the plastic that holds the triggers in that sucks I guess I'll have to reattach that later but for now I got down to the printed circuit film and the first thing I tried was to trigger the PS buttons pad with a paper clip the way these buttons work is that there are two separated pads and the button which has conductive material underneath will create a short circuit between the two pads when pressed down signaling that the button is being pressed as such you can use pretty much any conductive material to emulate the same effect as pushing the button but nothing seemed to be happening I followed the tracers from the PS button to the connector and checked for continuity and indeed there didn't seem to be any just to be sure I managed to get continuity from other places like the pads for the select button but absolutely nothing from the PS button I think we're starting to get our answer finally I used the paper clip on the actual board shorting the same points that the PS button would short when pressed and there it was the controller finally made a connection I think this pretty much confirms my hunch that the controller is mostly fine just that pesky PS button isn't registering any press considering the signal doesn't get to the connector either that means there must be a break somewhere in the circuit on the film now when it comes to these conductive film things I've never really known how to fix them I mean they're not quite wires and they're not quite pcbs so I just don't really have any frame of reference for working with them I had to look online and found a lot of people used conductive silver paint to basically recreate the trace externally this seemed like a reasonable idea but in order to actually get some of this paint I'd have to order it online and wait a few days for it to arrive I was feeling a little impatient and wanted to see if there was something I could do with the tools that I had had on hand I thought well if this is conductive it must be some kind of metal inside right Flex cables usually have straight up metal at the end so I thought maybe I could treat it like kind of a wire wrap and use a soldering iron to burn off the plastic film and then just solder a wire to the resulting exposed metal as it turns out um you can't do that I applied my soldering iron to it and within one second it burned right through the entire ribbon cable including any conductive material oops so instead of buying conductive silver paint and waiting a few days for it to arrive I bought a replacement conductive film and waited for it to arrive instead on the picture it looked like a perfect match but when I got it I found this hole over the PS button was filled in weird I guess different controller revisions did this differently unfortunately when I tried putting it back together as is the lack of hole made the button feel really stiff and awkward so I decided to take a bit of a risk and drill where the hole would be I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a little nerve-wracking to do that I mean I literally just got this replacement film because of broken traces around the PS button and I was about to risk breaking exactly the same traces on the new film but using a drill and cleaning it up with a razor afterwards I got a result that while not the cleanest in the world did clear the hole and crucially didn't break any of the traces with that out of the way everything seemed to be working fine I call this another fixed controller except I now had to fix all the problems that I created while working on it namely the broken plastic that held one of the triggers in turned out I actually had to do this twice because the other pegs started coming off too also the pad for the connector got a little bit scorched by the soldering iron so I just replaced that with some pieces of mounting tape it basically gets the job done I also had to resolder the wires for the vibrators because at some point those had snapped off why they're vibrators that's what they do but after all of that we finally have our second fully functional controller now the other three genuine controllers a d and e all had basically the same issue the left thumbstick wasn't quite working right a was an interesting one this was the one where the left thumbstick was so misaligned that it was digging into the case I opened it up took the thumbsticks off and found nothing really out of the ordinary I mean the joysticks worked one of them was just a little bit out of place I cleaned it up and replaced the thumbsticks with some nice new clean ones and found that just with that it was no longer digging into the case was that it was it just a bad thumbstick and nothing else wrong with the actual module well not exactly I do think it was a lot of the problem but I noticed even with the new sticks it was still slightly Too High by like just a few millimeters and not for any real discernible reason they both clicked down at exactly the same point but the left one is more bouncy it's like the spring is just higher I don't know how that could have happened maybe this joystick model is already a third party replacement or maybe some kind of damage happened that tugged the spring hard enough to unwind it a little who knows and ultimately I decided it wasn't a big enough problem I mean everything else on the controller worked the left thumbstick was just slightly too high which doesn't really get in the way of gameplay with d and e I tried the same deep joystick cleaning with alcohol even opening up some parts of the joystick to do it but none of it seemed to help after literal hours of trying to clean these things I eventually concluded the only real way to fix these things would be to replace the joystick modules entirely what complicates this is that Sony seems to have used two different kinds of joystick module in their controllers each with completely incompatible pin layouts despite the fact that these are both six axis controllers controller ease modules have three pins and controller D's have four and for some reason the four pin modules are much harder to find I already had some spare three pin modules sitting around so I whipped out my trustee soldering gun removed the old joystick module from E and soldered in a new one and it uh worked I mean we no longer have the same issue but when I was testing it the thumbstick behaved a little strangely it's really sensitive and while it is capable of analog movement it very much seems to try snapping to the four cardinal directions I don't actually know why I mean technically I bought these sticks for Xbox One controllers so maybe they're calibrated differently or maybe these replacement sticks just suck I'll probably have to replace this again just to find out and it's the same story with controller D I won't be finishing this one in the video just because I'm probably gonna have to wait until I can find a four pin joystick module which may take a while and after that it'll just be replacing it which you've already seen so I figure it's not important enough to delay this video for now I said I wasn't going to spend much time on the generics and I won't but I was curious to see if any of them could be fixed first The Imposter controller F this one's only real issue appears to be that the R1 button is out of alignment and the third LED is broken but that's hardly a deal breaker I actually have a feeling that simply opening and realigning the R1 button will fix it so that's exactly what I tried to do and that's exactly what fixed it yeah there was literally nothing more to it than that I don't know how it got misaligned in the first place maybe someone opened it before and really rushed putting it back together but yeah fixing it was extremely easy while all the axes are mapped to the wrong place on PC when I tested it on a real PS3 everything seemed fine and that is where it counts so I'm gonna call this one fixed let's take a look at G this had almost exactly the same symptoms as B it would power on but not connect and I wondered if this was going to be exactly the same problem that being a broken PS button until I just pressed the button and immediately proved myself wrong suddenly this became a lot more daunting it was no longer an obvious Hardware issue at least that I could think of it seemed like it was going to be some kind of esoteric logic issue which be much harder if not impossible to diagnose and fix nevertheless I cracked it open quite literally cracks because some of the plastic screw stalks just broke off cool I guess those screws are useless now I looked around and did find some Oddities like this timing Crystal which was mounted really strangely there's a straight up outline for it which it's completely misaligned out of it's kind of hard to believe that this was intentional unless it was really poorly assembled I wondered if it had been dropped and knocked out of alignment somehow and maybe that was leading to some kind of logic issue so I desoldered it and resolded it back into place but sadly it made no difference um I don't really know what to do about this one and since it's just a generic I think I'm Gonna Leave It controller eyes joysticks were a complete disaster both of them felt horrible and crunchy and if you remember somehow the right thumbstick doesn't even move in all directions I didn't have a lot of Hope for it but I just had to open it up and see what was happening inside looking at the left thumbstick there was clearly something wrong with it I couldn't exactly put my finger on what was happening but you can see this plastic rod that pokes out and presses L3 when you push the thumbstick in is really loose and shifts around a lot it's so weird and as you might expect the other joystick is even worse yeah that's the same plastic rod for pressing R3 but somehow it ended up inside the joystick module jammed into the top right corner I can only really guess what happened and my guess is that this thing was at some point slammed joystick down so hard that it completely snapped and dislocated these clicky bits and this is the end result I just don't know how to make anything else out of it I think the only way to fix these would be to replace them completely and once again I don't think I've got a bother for this one and last but okay maybe this is least controller H the one ravaged by battery juice technically this is probably fixable and probably pretty straightforward to do so however there were other weird things I noticed about it like the fact that this controller has no mini USB port on it it wasn't a wired controller like controller I so this was really weird because it's kind of a requirement on a PS3 controller since it's the only official way to charge and pair it with a console I briefly wondered if maybe it was a misidentified PS2 controller with some kind of counterpart dongle that makes it Wireless well I was half right it is in fact a PS3 controller but it doesn't use the PS3's official Wireless protocol instead requiring a USB dongle for some reason the ads boast about it using 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi rather than the PS3 standard Bluetooth but is that actually better or could they just not afford whatever licensing was require required for real Bluetooth and or real PS3 communication whatever the point is I don't have whatever dongle I'm supposed to have to use this controller meaning even if I did fix it I wouldn't even be able to use it considering that I don't think I'm gonna bother with this one either while I do feel a little guilty of leaving it in this condition the fact that it's just a generic and even if I did completely fix it I then have to track down some obscure dongle just to even use it really just makes me feel like it's not worth my time but hey that's all nine PS3 controllers considering I got six good ones including five genuine controllers for 40 bucks I think is pretty good anyways I hope you enjoyed this video This is actually my last one for the year so I hope you also enjoy whatever celebrations you have planned and I'll see you all in the next year bye guys foreign

Channel: MattKC

Views: 498,893

Keywords: mattkc, kc, matt kc

Id: VH42doiwjsA

Length: 24min 13sec (1453 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 25 2022