My first difficult task...Soldering!

Today I spent the better part of my day doing one of the things that I thought would be the most challenging in building this arcade cabinet.  As I wait for Kray to build the arcade cabinets I thought I would try my luck in padhacking thee Madcatz Brawlpad.  As an electrical engineer I should know how to solder but I haven't really done a whole lot of soldering before.  So today, I thought I would put my skills to the ultimate test.  The alternative was to order special PCBs that are solder-less but they are more expensive and believe it or not, I'm trying to save some money.  So earlier this week I went to Gamestop and brought two Madcatz Brawlpads for $19.99 a piece.  I found some instructions online that indicated the signal and ground spots and I decided to go to work.  Here is what followed:

This is one of the Madcatz Brawlpads.  It was very easy to disassemble.

Here is my Radioshack soldering iron.  It has two settings.  One for 20W and the other for 40W.  For this project I just needed to set it to 20W.

On the other side of my table are these Crimp-On Ring Tongue Terminals from Radioshack.  They come in a pack of 16 and I brought 4 bags for a total of 64 terminals.  Here is one bag displayed:

The first thing I did was cut 16 8-inch 22AWG red wire.  I also had a schematic of all the positive signals and ground labeled on a brawlpad displayed on my iPad:

 The next step was to strip about 1mm of the coat off each end of the wires.  Here is how it ended up:

 I then spent about 15 minutes crimping one end of each wire with the ring tongue terminals.  I wanted to make a good connection so I squeezed really hard with my crimper.

The palm of both of my hands turned red with all the crimping that I was doing:

Then I went to work on soldering.  I also used flux to make sure that the connections were very tight to the contacts.

Here's a picture of the back connections being made.

After about an hour of soldering this is how it ended.  It wasn't elaborate or pretty but it's better then buying some expensive PCB or using excessive hotglue to make connections between the wire and contacts.

Here's another view of all the connections.

I later tested it and there were two wires that were not connected properly.  I had to end up resodering them and when I tested them they worked fine.  So that is one controller down and another one to go (I'll do it tomorrow)!

2 Madcatz Brawlpad controllers: $43.28
4 Pack of 16 Ring Tongue Terminals: $9.50
Terminal Strips: $7.96

Total so far spent:  $600.10