I recently acquired a broken Xbox one cheap. The reason it was cheap was it was broken, it'd been knocked off a shelf and the degree of damage done was pretty intense considering it'd just been dropped. The case was opened, though the previous owner claimed it was looked at by a tech savvy mate, three of the four clips holding the APU fan to the heatsink were broken, and the wireless Ariel plug on the front RF plate was completely ripped off, along with the ribbon cable connecting the Power, eject and sync buttons to the face plate. I'm not exactly a fan of the soft buttons and decided what this xbox needed was some tac switches, good old fashioned tac switches.

Step 1: Testing

Due to a severe lack of pinouts and diagrams for the Xbox Ones front RF plate, I was tasked with finding the pinouts myself, this was made easy by just following the traces from the ribbon on the front face plate to where they plugged into the RF plate. (RF Plate is the plate with the power light on it) Once I found this out I literally just winged it, logically, all computers turn on when the power button pins are shorted, usually one's ground, but I wasn't sure due to the touch nature of the buttons, so I just hooked all the wires up, but first I just turned it on by shorting the pins with a screwdriver. It powered on, it worked well, and it was doing all this sitting on top of a book.

Step 2: Soldering

The next step in the process was to solder the wires, I definitely do not have the right soldering iron for this, after more than 2 hours I got four of the 6 pins soldered that I needed, but I ended up finding out that the Xbox One motherboard has two vacant headers under the CD drive for the power and eject buttons, so I used one of those for Eject because I was having no luck otherwise, and connected the second wire to ground. It's important to note that one pin is grounded and the other is not. Test it using a multi meter and the pin that doesn't give 0 resistance to ground is your main for that line, the other line out of the switch can ground anywhere, I grounded mine on the front RF plate.

Step 3: Test and Label

So after I was sure the soldering wasn't going to come off, I put it all back together and tested it. I'm not very smart and didn't bother to label the wires, I definitely connected them correctly, I just didn't know to which switch I connected what, so trail and error found differentiated the power, sync and eject buttons, not the best way to do this but it worked. The speaker and sounds are good for this because it makes a unique sound with each of the buttons. once that was done I reassembled the console and made sure it worked once again.

Step 4: Done! Notes

With it all put back together, it was tested once again to make sure everything worked and it did. So there you have it, a pinout of the 7 pin ribbon connector, and proof that it works.

Notes: You may have noticed there's a computer PSU in almost every shot, that is my power supply, it didn't come with one so I had to rig it up to work, I'm not going to make a tutorial on that at this stage, there's plenty out there for the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One works the same, it just requires more amperage/wattage. One thing I will mention on that front, the communication wire from the Xbox One can be set to turn the PSU on, so it operate normally, meaning, when the Power button on the Xbox is pressed it triggers the PSU to turn on, saving a separate switch on the power supply itself. To do this, simply use a BC548 Transistor, connect the Collector to the PS_ON wire in the 24 Pin ATX, the Emitter to a ground wire, and the base to the blue Trigger wire coming from the Xbox. I used a 12K resistor in between the Trigger wire and the Emitter, but I'm not sure that's necessary as I measured the voltage off the Trigger wire and it was 3.3 volts, to be safe though, use it. The Emitter-Base Voltage on the BC548 is 5 volts, so it should be fine.

The Broken Ariel that connected the wireless module to the front RF was just that, an Ariel, and it works perfectly after I replaced the original wire with one from a laptop screen, with the breakout plate and all. This is necessary unless you use wired controllers, as the controllers run through this connection also.

Thanks for reading everyone, this is my first instructable and comments and discussion is always welcomed.