Tool help, please...

well, i COULD basically scan both sides of the board, but since i just repaired the damn thing, i'd rather not desolder it to pieces for that.

been pretty busy on my own side too (translating psp game ) as for now so havent' had the scan done of that yet in any case.

i'll try to get the bottom side scanned this week and we'll see from that then.
getting closer to my monthly cleanup of the V9 too so that would leave me a good point to take a scan of a retail part too.

what comes to testing stuff on it like figuring out the pins and stuff, that i must leave for someone else as i seriously lack time to properly do anything for now

hopefully the scan will atleast be some help tho.


ediT: got some motivation so here we go

 

I wouldn't do so either :nod:.

Thanks for the scan, it is greatly appreciated :thumbsup:.
As far as I can see, the black components are just coupling capacitors and irrelevant for reconstructing the connector's pinout. The manually-soldered wires carry the 9V supply voltage (e.g. for the force feedback motors); I would expect these connections to be present on retail controller ports as well, but I haven't checked it yet.

Could I ask you, if you have some time before reassembling your TOOL (and are in the right mood ;-)), to perform a wire test then? I suspect the pins of the controller and memory card ports to be connected directly to pins on the ribbon connector, so this should not take that much time :katamari:.

 

Brown components soldered between the controller connector pins are decoupling capacitors. The black components are protection devices (pairs of zener diodes) hooked to all digital lines of the controller ports (SIO). There's a 8v line meant to power the rumble motors on the controller and if that wire shorts with any of the SIO pins the IOP could be damaged. That's why the zeners were added to the design. I'd recommend users of TOOL units to only use original SONY pads and avoid knock offs or original pads with damaged cord due to the fact they may short the controller port.

The TOOL port is easily repairable as the zener diodes are on the solder side of the board. In the case of retail units the Zeners are under the connector and one is required to dismantle it. (de-solder the conenctor to gain access to them).


Edit: missing space

 

i guess i can poke it with a multimeter a tiny bit to see if anything goes anywhere. I must note again tho that im a horrible klutz when it comes to this stuff

i should have plenty of time for that in any case, it's taking quite a while to obtain a scph-10000 to use as replacement parts for the drive so as far as i can see now, the tool will remain in pieces for quite a while still.

also, not sure if it's worth a mention but since it's not too visible in the pic, who knows...

if you look at th red wires on the scan, the top side of both of them have a cut trace under them.
so could it just be that it's used to redirect something, by cutting it and rewiring it or something ?

 

here's what i dug out so far
used oli_lar's pic to illustrate the positioning.
i'll do the rest when i get some more time but a start is a start

edit: updated with full pinout.
this took me a good while of poking with multimeter so hopefully it's of some use
pins 1, 9, 16, 21, 28 and 36 are ground

 

Good work, many thanks! :thumbsup:
I'll soon dismantle a retail controller port to get its pinout, and I'm really interested in how they differ. The port's already lying on my desk, so I just need my vacation to start... :katamari:

 

nice.

it's not that i lack interest towards this but i moreso lack time to do anything extensive with it. not to mention aside poking pins with multimeter, im not much of a help

would be nice to see a solution to use a retail part in tools as i doubt the one i have will be the last of the broken ones. And as stated few posts back, it is not fun at all to solder back in place

i'll run a doublecheck on couple of pins tomorrow on the tool port but the current should be correct.
just bothers me a bit that pin7 of controller ports is 18 only where as it's 17 and 18 on MC ports and the layout is pretty symmetrical, so i'll check it again.

i think that 17, 18, 19 and 20 are the 8V line

 

and it turns out i was correct afterall.
the seventh pin connects to both pins 17 and 18 on the ribbon cable.

here's a corrected layout

 

Thanks for the updated picture :icon_bigg. I finally managed to find some time for the retail controller port, so here it is:



Pictures of the PCB:


First observation: the retail port has less Z-diodes than the TOOL port. Only the controller data lines have Z-diodes attached, whereas the memory card is connected directly to the ribbon cable. Any idea why Sony did this? Seems really weird to me...

Second observation: the pinout is almost the same as in the TOOL. Port 2 is identical, Port 1 differs only in which pin connects to pin 4 of the controller connector.
Did you notice the three contacts immediately above the regular 9 controller pins? The middle and right one are connected to ground, but the left one is an additional signal line (maybe "controller present"; for the left controller, its connected to pin 5 of the ribbon connector). Are these present in the TOOL controller port as well? If so, which pins do they connect to?

In your picture, Controller 1 connects to pins 2,3,4,5 (pin 6 missing), whereas Controller 2 connects to pins 29,30,31,33 (pin 32 missing). As you state, the rest of the schematic is symmetrical, so I'm wondering why the pin assignment is different here; are you sure this is really pin 5 for Controller 1, not pin 6? Also, did you find where the other ("missing") pins of the respective groups (5/6 for port 1, 32 for port 2) connect to?

19+20 are +8V, but 17+18 are in fact +3.5V. Here's the pinout of the relevant part of the retail mainboard (copied off the SCPH 30000 6th Ed schematics):

Too bad we don't have schematics of the TOOL, that would make things way easier...

 

awesome job :thumbsup:

i just realized looking at your pic that i did miss the 3 "pins" that are above the controller port, so i'll check those in a while.

i'll also check pins 5 and 33 again and try to find where the rest of the pins such as 9 and 25 go since on the pic i made out, they're missing completely.

update:

i redid the thing completely, verified few parts and added the missing pins from above the controller pins.
turns out that the pin5 was just an error on my end, it is indeed pin 6 whereas pin 5 is the extra pin of slot 1
here's an updated layout

pins 9 and 25 will remain a mystery to me as of yet.

i can't help but thinking that the traces that are cut off on the TOOL port have something to do with this. :\
<---- bothered

 

Thanks for the update :thumbsup:. I think you mean pin 13+25, as pin 9 is GND. They are labeled /DTR3 and /DTR2 in the schematic, but I couldn't find them on the PCB as well. Judging from the layout, I'd assume both of these pins to go to the memory card ports, but there don't seem to be any other hidden contacts there.
Maybe these are just remnants of the IOP's RS232 interface and not used in the final design at all? I can't see any trace leading to them on the ribbon connector, nor any via that could be used to route them to another layer of the board. Although, as the board does only use two layers for all other signals, it would be odd to introduce a new one just for these two pins, so I think these two ones are not used at all.

What really puzzles me now: the pinouts of the retail and TOOL controller ports are identical, so why doesn't a retail port work in a TOOL?

 

Are the connectors inverted ? That could be a reason...

 

hehe, 13 and 25 is what i meant (gotta stop posting half-asleep)
tried looking at it and it's pretty much as you said, unless there's some hidden secrets in there, the pins don't seem to connect to anything.

im still a bit puzzled about that red wire tho. why cut it off and then connect back to where it was ? doensn't seem too smart
it is the +3V line as from looking at the boardscan, so maybe it has something to do with supplying extra voltage to something or cutting power completely off somewhere else, maybe the extra pairs of Z-diodes have their part on re-routing it.

im really a total retard when it comes to these so my guess is as good as the next guy's

 

Did you check that both sides of the cut trace are really connected to +3V? Maybe one of them is ground and just shields data lines from noise. I've seen other strange signal routing on retail mainboards, which also use ground traces in similar ways.

Also, I don't think the components connecting ground and the supply lines are Z-diodes, as that wouldn't make too much sense. I believe l_oliveira is right and these are just decoupling capacitors.

 

bah this is getting confusing.

 

Because this thread has became "a bit confusing" I must mention this:

(Original) PS1/PS2 memory cards do not need 8v to operate properly. Sony gave up from supplying 8v in the memory card slot since the 7700x series PS2s.
This disabled a lot of counterfeit PS1 and PS2 memory cards.

I think at some point on the early design of the PS2 they decided to not supply 8v on the memory card slot but had the TOOL controller port boards already manufactured.
They got soldered to the mechanical connectors then they decided to return 8v to the connector. Because they cut the trace before assembling them, it's more economical to just fit a wire than replace the whole assembly.

The black parts on Mugi's picture are Z-Diodes and the brown parts are SMD ceramic capacitors. The ones with three pins have two diodes inside.
The ones with five pins have four.

On retail units there is no Z-Diodes on the memory card slots because these ports are not exposed to 8v short circuits like the controller ports are so they decided to omit the diodes and save a few cents per console.

 

this is getting way out of my league now

i don't possess even near of the technical knowledge required to pursue this matter any further.

still hoping that you geniuses come up with an answer but i think that my random guessing is nothing more than a clutter in the thread

 

To follow up, the controller assembly from a SCPH-10000 and a DTL-10000S are both different from the TOOL's variant. Given that the TEST was released after the TOOL, we may be totally SOL in terms of finding proper replacements.