Guitar Hero LED Mod

Step 8: Wire it up - part 1

All of these LEDs are to be run in parallel. These are run off of a simple coin battery of the type that come in the keychain LED flashlights, but for a more serious application we'd use a 9-volt and some resistors.

Here you can see the original plan for the wiring. Each set of five copper pads is wired together and the wires on the right in the photo go to the battery.

Originally, the LEDs were set up so that both legs would have to make contact to light up, but this was giving us erratic results. So instead one leg, and it doesn't matter which, gets soldered to the wires for a constant connection. This drops our possible points of failure and gives us more of a likelihood of seeing pretty lights.

Comments

[mrshanko]

 Would this work for Guitar Hero for the DS?

[zack247]

it could, but it would be harder to do, since everything is much smaller

[gblax123]

This is amazing!!

[razzmire]

u know wht i did i took the leds form a couple of flashlights and then used the batteries from the flashlight do not use mor than the amount of batt in one of the lights.

[The Jamalam]

Hi again, just wanted to ask whether you had to open up the guitar controller to replace the battery or is it accessible from the outside?

[BluryBlue]

I got a wireless guitar that already has batteries i them, so instead of using a 9 volt batter, would this work with the 4 AAs that are already in my controller?

[pyro man]

or you can buy a used wired controller for about $10

[pyro man]

4 AAs would only make 6 volts i would just separate the 2 power sources

[unbentcrayfish]

What if you have a wireless one??? I'm tring it and the red light(the one next to battery [AAA]spot)isn't working, I tested it and it works fine to about 5-7 volts. The batteries are full& I don't know what to do. TIP:Don't try this if you don't have or can't get a SMALL-TIPPED SOLDERINDG IRON/GUN...

[Leviticus6432]

I like what you did here... I think i have a better way to wire it though... First find the 6 solders on the end of the circuit board that has the buttons on it (the very right of the pic in step 8) I forgot what order their in, but I know the top one is ground... so go down to the second solder and follow the little green strip on the circuit board to the button to find out what color it is. Once you found out which solder is for which button, solder on a wire to each and connect it to the led of the corresponding light. (if the second solder down connects to the green button, connect it to the green button's light) After you do that, you need to find the + on the main circuit board and connect it to the 2nd wire on each led... I hope you can understand all of this, if you would do it and get pics up it is actually much simpiler than it sounds. also, to simpilify making new buttons that are see-through, you could just make clear ones and put a colored led in each, if you can find a led of each color... By the way, I thought of using the controller's power earlier to power the lights without reading rcp90ftw's comment, but seeing how he wrote it first, he gets credit for that

[mhagen41]

can you post pictures of the updated wires and circuits? if not can you explain what you mean by soldering on leg to the wires?

[fungus amungus]

I can put some new pics up on monday.

[rcp90ftw]

Yeah, I'd also like to see this as well, I'd really like to give this a try in the near future. Also, wiring the LEDs to run off the controller's 5V USB power when used with a resistor would work fine, correct? It's a wired controller, so batteries wouldn't be an issue this way.

[Spud387]

I also an curious about this. My friend and I want to attempt this, but this step confuses me. Could you show us what you mean by solder one leg to the wire? thx, GJ BTW :)