

Since I want to keep all of the parts on the PCB, I needed to know which wires on the ribbon go where. Normally the wire ribbon is glued down against the PCB to keep it flat, but I needed to see where everything was connected to so I peeled it back enough to see the connections. As you can see in the picture, the wire is numbered one through 8.



Since it's a bit hard to see exactly where each wire is connected, a trick I used was to hold the PCB up to the light which makes seeing the connections a million times easier.



I started with some easy ones to find out, such as the push buttons. As most tinkerers know, basic push buttons already have their top two legs and bottom two legs connected, respectively (in this case, A & C are connected and B & D are connected, but A&C are not connected to A&D until the button is pressed).



For these buttons, they each have a leg that connects ONLY to a wire on the ribbon, so that means they must each be the 'data' wire for each button. In each case, the 'data' leg is either D or B, so that means A&C for both buttons can be connected to Vcc . If you follow the path of Vcc, you see that it connects to all of the Pin1's for all four potentiometers.



Now you know Vcc is Pin1 for all of the potentiometers, so Pin3 must be ground and Pin2 must be for data . Sure enough, each Pin1 corresponds to a unique wire, whereas all Pin3's connect to one another and share a common wire on the ribbon.



Now that we've accounted for all of the wires (and of course having written down what number wire on the ribbon they correspond to...), we can create the following table to help ourselves get organized:



1 - Pin 3 on all four pots (GND)

2 - Pin B of left thumbstick (the only top pin of left thumbstick) (button circuit/digital pin1)

3 - Pin 1 on all four pots, pins A & C (bottom pins) on both buttons (Vcc - 5v)

4 - Pin D of right thumbstick (the only top pin of right thumbstick) (button circuit/to digital pin2)

5 - Pin 2 of vertical movement for right thumbstick (analog pin1)

6 - Pin 2 of horizontal movement for right thumbstick (analog pin2)

7 - Pin 2 of horizontal movement for left thumbstick (analog pin3)

8 - Pin 2 of vertical movement for left thumbstick (analog pin4)

