The Screws and Wires that Make a Controller

Kenneth A Guaman

Writing for Engineering 

Professor Elizabeth Von Uhl

April 6, 2023,

The Screws and Wires that Make a Controller

Introduction

Have you ever wondered what is inside the things we use and how they work? For example, items like light bulbs, phones, stoves, or controllers? We use these items in our daily lives, and if it somehow gets a broken screen or stops working entirely, we simply change the light bulb for a new one, buy a new phone simply because our old phone has a broken screen, or hire someone knowledgeable about fixing these items as it is simple to the repair men. So why don’t we learn how to repair them ourselves instead of wasting resources, time, and money? Learning and improving new things can be overwhelming and terrifying for many people, especially if it’s delicate and expensive. Take a switch controller; you see them before, haven’t you? Developed by “Yoshiaki Koizumi, who assembled the Switch’s hardware development team, tried to mix and match developers with different areas of expertise/The control accessories can be separated and locked into place on either side of the tablet or combined to make a more traditional controller./Nintendo began evaluating the concept of the Nintendo Switch in 2012, a short while after releasing the Wii U.” making the development of the switch in a short amount of time (Staff, H. C. 2022, November 28). Either a red or blue controller small enough for your hand to grab and pretty easy to break and wear down when putting enough force on them. For such a small item, there are so many things going on inside it; it’s so complex with its screws, electronics, and material made out of; it’s fascinating that people have made this, and humanity made it to this point to create something like this. 

Figure 1, Separated pieces of the Switch Controller

Exterior & Buttons

Looking at the surface of the switch controller, you can see that the controller has around eleven buttons. The right hand of the controller is the same as how it looks, and the buttons on the left controller are. Holding the right part of the controller, there are three buttons on the left side of the controller, two of which looks the same, but there are carvings on them; one having an “Sl” at the bottom and one at the top one has an “SR,” both of them serves the same functions when using the top buttons of the two controllers as one and in between them is a small black button where you can sync the controller to your switch console or your friends switch. On the right side of the controller, there are no buttons at all, but at the edges, instead of being a sharp corner, is a soft, round edge connecting the controller’s bottom and top sides, making it smooth and comfortable to use. The bottom of the controller has a black piece embedded into the controller. This may be a fashion accessory or a senor of some kind however there is no part similar to the left part of the controller. As for the top part of the controller, there are two buttons; however, these buttons are also a part of the backside of the controller as it curves to the back, a small thin button that has an “R” on it and the second button but more like a trigger has an engraving of “ZR or 2R” it is hard to tell as even with lighting or cleaning the dirt to read as for the back of the controller, where you would place four fingers, and pam; there is one single button that it is black on the top right side where it is next to the trigger. As for the front of the controller, there are six buttons in place; one of them on the top left has a “+” symbol, the others that are next to them are four buttons, an “x” on the top, a “y” on the middle left, an “a” on the middle right, and a “b” on the lower part. The last button is located just below the joystick, where the button has a photo of a home engraved on it, where it can take you to the home screen of the system console. These buttons can serve different purposes for what games you are playing, but usually, the “a” button is to select an application and the “b” to back out of it.

Screws & Interior 

When opening the joint switch controller, you will need a small screwdriver, tweezers, and a small plate to put the tiny screws and pieces so we don’t lose them. Removing the casing on the back by gently loosing the screws on the back of the controller, turning them to the left, and removing them will be a little challenging. Do not worry or get nervous; it will take some force to open it up; this is the easy part. Once it is open, gently lay the controller down and have the insides face up and the buttons on the table. Facing a small battery that powers the controller, a Li-ion rechargeable battery, short for Lithium, is very common in electronics to use as batteries; you can touch it but not damage it with anything blunt or sharp unless you want to hurt your hand or get caught on fire. You would also see flexible ribbon cables; what are they, you may ask? Simple, it’s a flexible cable to move around in small tight spaces. They are made the same as regular copper wires in other machinery; connected to the three buttons on the right side of the controller; when you pop off the battery with a little force, the sidebar with the buttons will fall off, but it will not break; it will be dangling; you will see more of them inside the controller.

Figure 2, The Lithium Battery

You then would use the small screwdriver to unscrew the two little ones from the top right and bottom right. Once you lift the tiny screw gently so it won’t fall off because it will be hard to find them, use a bag or a plastic container to collect them. After using some force to take out an interior piece of casing, you would see the main board with flex ribbon cables connected to the side, upper, and front buttons; this is what can be called the controller’s brain. Controllers, whether tv controllers, video game console controllers, or rv controllers, will have a board similar to the one you see in front of you; not the exact shape and size, obviously but similar. Placing my thumb on the board, I can feel so many little pieces and bumps, sharp edges, and geometric shapes that it is almost hard to believe that people made this. The board’s color is mainly dark green, but when you look at the thin piece at the upper right, it has this light green on it. 

Figure 3, Interior casing

The Board

There are so many gold pieces on the board that it is hard to count how much there is engraved on it; not only that, but you can also see that there are these white and black boxes. You may be asking what these sharp lines on the board are. Think of them as wires; instead of using copper, it is engraved into the board that would help send data, electricity, and communication to the controller. The thin, flexible cable wires go into them and connect to the controller’s brain; if you were to press the “Y” button, for example, the cable wire would receive that someone pressed the button and will send a message to the board and execute the command. Looking at the board, you can see some numbers on them, such as “007-AE0045,” which could be the number that represents the product manufactured number or possibly something entirely else. It seems so easy to break the little boxes with a little force which you can, but when you want to disconnect the wires to the buttons for cleaning or repair, you would need to use the tweezers on the white box. The white box has a small lock to lock the cables in place so they would not be removed easily simply by moving the controller around too much.

Figure 4, The Brain of the Switch Controller

Removing Wires

By gently taking the tweezers and lifting the black lock on them with just a little force, it will open easily. Bam, you can easily see the sidebars with the three buttons and the joystick bottom side in front of you, but something in your way is preventing you from removing the wires of the joystick and sidebar, and it’s the board. You can see that four “big” screws make a shape of a square, two smaller ones next to the top left and bottom right of it. Lastly, a big screw above the square shape is made by the screws. Again by gently removed the screws so that we would not lose them and not cause damage to the internals of the controller. After removing the screws, here comes the hard part removing the locks that connect to the side buttons of the controller using the tweezers; by using as little force as possible, we can remove the cables from the board and separate them. Then while using the tweezers, we would have to remove the cable wire that connects to the top controller button using the same steps as before that connects to the “ZR” and “R.”

Figure 5, The Side Bar charger

Once done, we can lift the board and see that screws and a thin fiber cable connect the stick to the board. Noticing that the battery is connected to the board by small copper wires, one surprising thing is that ordinary wires are used instead of thin cable wire, the blue and red cables connect to a small white box similar to the battery. Trying to separate them by using the tweezers and opening the lock, I noticed that it was connected to a small tin box covered by a thin foam layer. By doing so, the panel was dangling from the case, and The only thing keeping it together was the connection of the tiny little box. The small tin box is hard to open with the tool at my disposal however, looking in a Google search, we can see what is inside. Knowing what is inside, we see copper wires wrapped wholly and around compressed with each other; it is a motor of sorts. I know different motors from the past; some are small and round, while others are bigger. The purpose of having one is by giving off vibrations in the remote to reflect what is happening in the game; for Ex. If you hit a wall in the game, the motor will turn on and vibrate the controller.

Figure 6, Interior of the motor

Figure 7, The motor

Figure 8, The Joystick

Placing it down on the table and removing the wires connected to the board with tweezers, I successfully removed the panel, casing, and the small tin box. Laying down the front case of the switch controller, you can see how hollow it is and the holes there are. Some of them are used for screws holding the boards and other parts in place, while others are used to screw them into place; looking closely at it, you can see there are some sharp edges on the curves of the controller and also that there are spaces like the semi-rectangle where the tin box is supposed to be. As you can see, there is still the thin button on the case but other than that; there is something else to remove from the joint controller. For the back part of the controller interior there is nothing left at all to pick apart, only some sharp edges with similar smooth curves as the front interior of the controller.

Figure 9, Back Interior

Figure 10, Front Interior 

Conclusion

Going through breaking down the switch controller, you can see that people have put much thought into developing this controller. The exterior design wants it to be sleek, but the inside is intricate, trying to use the available space and make it functional. Understanding something like this is difficult, even for someone who started learning electronics or knows very little. It takes a long time to describe which item does what, but if we were to get to the nitty gritty of it the paper would be far too long. For such small things, we assume we can understand simply because of size, such as a torch or pencil sharpener; we can break them down easily merely because it is in our nature to do so, but learning, repairing, and improving comes with time and effort that we must put into; that is a job of an engineer. 

References

Staff, H. C. (2022, November 28). Nintendo Switch: Everything you need to know. History. Retrieved April 5, 2023, from https://history-computer.com/nintendo-switch-guide/

Guaman, Kenneth. Photograph of the interior and exterior of a switch controller. 28 March.

Nintendo Switch Teardown. iFixit. (2023, February 8). Retrieved April 5, 2023, from https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Nintendo+Switch+Teardown/78263