In an earlier post I talked about work done repairing a Playstation 3 controller, but a couple of years down the line and an upgrade later I’m in a similar position with a PS4 controller aka a Dualshock 4.
This time the problem is with one of the small joysticks / analogue controllers. One of them was frequently getting stuck or becoming unresponsive. Unsurprisingly this is a common problem, and there is lots of information out there on this.
The sticks are made up of a mechanical centre which handles the movement and the push button, and two carbon ‘wipers’ which track the two axes of movement. Dismantling the controller is fairly easy (just a matter of removing the screws and teasing it apart) and then you are left with the main board:
You can see on the right the complete stick. On the left, you can see the two green sections (which contain the wipers) have been popped off the main body and bent back on their pins revealing the wipers (white). It seems you can bend these back and forth a good few times without them breaking but you do need to be careful.
I was able to buy complete replacement stick assemblies for a few pounds off eBay. The first time I did it I simply removed the white bodies and cleaned out the inside with switch cleaner before replacing with new ones. This worked for a while, but then I hit problems again.
This time I decided to replace the green units completely. This should have been easy – simply a matter of desoldering three joints and replacing with a new one. However for some reason this proved extremely difficult. I just couldn’t get the solder to melt cleanly, and the pins eventually broke off in the holes and it proved a right pain to suck what was left out and clean up the holes. Somehow or other I eventually managed it and was able to solder in a new one, but it was so awkward I left the other one in place. By good fortune the one I started with was the one with the fault.
After getting it back together again everything seemed to work except the controller would not charge. I went back over the board and scraped off a few stray blobs of solder and after that it seemed to work correctly again.
So whilst these controllers are repairable it’s a fiddly job. You probably need a professional solder sucker to do it, I was using a good iron but only a cheap manual spring loaded sucker which wasn’t up to it.
I might have been unlucky… but at least now I have a working controller again! They remain really quite expensive to buy.
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