The XBox USB mod

This is a common hack with a lot of useful variations. You can make an Xbox controller to PC USB adapter like the fine folks at llamma.com or you can splice a USB connector into the convenient Xbox controller extension cable like these guys at xbox-scene.

However, if you’re like me, you enjoy the idea of your Xbox as a PC. That considered, a slightly more streamlined modification is called for.

History

The many applications of the Microsoft Xbox are more or less incredible. I bought my first one on Ebay for a little under $100 in December of ‘06. I then proceeded to add a 400 gig hard drive and install Xbox Media Center and the joy just continues. I can play backup games, more audio/video formats than I know what to do with, and run an utterly convenient FTP server whenever I need one.

Given that, I was pretty excited when a neighbor fried her Xbox and offered it to me. I told her it was an easy fix (new power supply and about 15 minutes of work) but she said I could have it anyway. Thank you! =)

As my first Xbox is pretty well tricked out in terms of gaming and multimedia, I had to come up with another use for this new one! I ended up deciding that because Linux tends to make everything better, Gentoox was a good choice. XBMC is amazing software, but having a cheap, quiet Linux server that uses less than 90 watts of power would be spiffy.

So what does one need to make a functional PC? Peripherals. Video-out? The Xbox has that covered. Keyboard and mouse? Not so much. Time to get crackin’!

 

Planning

As I mentioned in the first paragraph, there are a lot of ways to get the Xbox to do USB. if you take any part of the controller cable apart, you find five wires: red, green, black, white, and yellow. If you take apart a female USB connector, you’ll find it shares four of these: the red, green, black and white wires. =) Neat, huh?

The fifth, yellow wire is proprietary for the Xbox. From what I understand, that uses a special frequency tied to the H-Sync signal of the composite video signal in order to facilitate light guns and such.

All of this means adding USB connectivity to the Xbox is about as easy as you could ask for. Regarding the method of implementation, that’s up to you. For my initial experiment, I spliced one connector from a USB bracket into the Xbox’s controller extension cable. Once that worked exactly as expected, I knew I could do it better. I don’t like the idea of using a floppy adapter cable for my Gentoo server to have a keyboard, and it just doesn’t look cool.

After a little figuring, I decided to add two USB ports to the front panel of the Xbox. Others have added ports to the rear of the box, but those seem inconvenient. Be forewarned, adding them to the front is a way bigger pain than the back, as you need to make a lot of case modifications to fit anything in the front.

A technical note to consider is that, once you connect a USB device, the corresponding controller port will not work. This is because you’re effectively rerouting the voltage and data lines to another location, and the Xbox isn’t set up to support another USB root hub.

 

Gettin’ Busy

Materials:

• Xbox (…yeah)
• Torx Bits, Screwdriver
• USB bracket
• Soldering Iron, Heat-shrink Tubing
• Dremel (or something to cut plastic and aluminum)
• Scissors, Electrical Tape, Sand Paper, etc

I list a dremel as a required tool, but it’s more of a luxury. I actually used Xacto blades and scissors to do the case modifications… but I do not recommend that, haha. It was way more difficult than it needed to be and caused the end result to look less polished.

First things first, we need to make room in our Xbox case for the new bracket. Open that bad boy up (six torx screws on the bottom of the Xbox), get rid of the drives (another few torx screws), and assess the situation at hand. I chose to mount mine vertically on the left-hand side, so that’s what I’ll describe here.

Removing the face plate of the Xbox isn’t very difficult, but it’s not very obvious at first either. There are three points by which it’s secured to the rest of the chassis. Two tabs on the outside on the left and right side, and one little tab in the middle and on the inside of the case.

All you need to do is stick a screwdriver (or something) into the left- or right-side gap and pry a little.

 

 

 

That third of the face plate will pop off.

 

 

 

 

Then use your thumb to press up on the little tab, releasing it.

 

 

 

 

Now the face plate is free. All that’s left to do is unplug the power/eject buttons from the motherboard and the whole assembly will be in your hands.

From here, there are two paths. First, you could start soldering straight away, but then things might not fit right. So, instead, I chose to hack the case to pieces first. The easiest part was cutting a big square hole in the face plate for the bracket to screw into.

 

Pretty simple stuff, as you can see. It would’ve been incredibly simple had I had a dremel on hand at the time. Instead, however, I was forced to use an Xacto knife as a chisel and attempt to slice and pound my way through the plastic, haha. It worked, amidst much pounding and uneccesary sweating, and I sanded the edges down afterwards.

 

 

The holes are for the little screws that originally held the USB ports to the metal bracket.

Next in line… hacking the rest of the case, the shielding, and the DVD drive to pieces! This is why others have chosen to put the USB ports on the back of their Xboxes… but, as I said earlier, I far prefer the accessibility of front-mounted ports. Additionally, if you chose some other location for yours, your modifications will naturally be different.

You have to remove a section of the bottom grill from the front of the case, a chunk of the shielding from the front, left corner, and another rectangle from the left side of the shield. To get the shield out, obviously you’re going to have to remove the motherboard and power supply.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I also had to remove one of the front support posts from the DVD drive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, I needed to shave a good bit of excess plastic off of the USB bracket to squeeze it in next to the DVD drive.

Now that you can attach your USB ports to your Xbox, you can measure lengths of cable and see how it all will fit. Once you’ve got a comfortable setup, it’s time to set in on the seriously geeky work – the soldering! The cool thing is, because Microsoft decided to stick with the USB color-coding, the soldering is beyond simple.

 

Soldering

Time to take your USB bracket and hack the connector off. =) Cut the shielding to the appropriate length for your setup (mine was almost perfect), and strip the wires on your chosen first connector.

 

 

 

Because this tutorial is being written ex post facto, I don’t have any pictures of the actual soldering. All I’ve got for illustration purposes is the finished product. As you can see, I just soldered the appropriately colored wires together. The yellow joints were done with heat shrink tubing and the black is electrical tape. I was experimenting with different methods of connection, so sometimes I was able to use heat shrink and sometimes I was not. The connector to the Xbox motherboard integrates both ports, similarly to the USB bracket’s original connector. Be careful though! There’s just enough wire to go from the Xbox motherboard to the controller module with a minute amount of slack; be sure to get your joints right on the first go.

A method I used to lessen the strain on the shorter cables was to strip the USB connector’s cables bare in two places: at the end and about a half-inch above that. After cutting the controller module’s cables in half and stripping the tips, this allowed me to solder the wire coming from the controller module to the exposed section of the USB wire and the wire from the motherboard to the tip of the USB wire, effectively lengthening the wire between the controller module and the motherboard. …I wish I had more detailed pictures to explain that, but hopefully you’ll see what you can do when you have the materials in your hands. =)

After the soldering is complete, you’re nearly there! Personally, I tested the whole lot of it with a multimeter. The pins on the USB ports should match with the respective pins on the controller ports. USB ports share common power and ground lines throughout the entire circuit, so if you connect the whole assembly to the Xbox motherboard, you should have continuity between every controller port and both USB ports on those common lines.

For the final step, I used a vice and a hacksaw (not kidding) to mutilate the metal bracket so it would fit in its original place in front of the USB ports. This adds some dust protection, stability to the ports, and just looks way better than a gaping hole in the front of your Xbox.

 

Completion

Now what? Put the case back together. =) This took a good amount of adjustment and trial-and-error for me the first time, but now it reassembles with ease.

Woohoo, finished! Now your Xbox is ready for USB keyboards, mice, flash drives, cell phone chargers or… hamster wheels? …Of course!

Mine will be used primarily for a keyboard during the configuration of the Gentoox-based jBox and perhaps for the occasional thumb drive if I write a simple auto-mounting script.

Now… go forth and marvel at the professional look and snazzy functionality of your new creation!

 

Notes and Afterthoughts

This project was a first for me in a few areas. First case mod and first soldering job, for instance. That being said, it was poorly planned, had a lot of improvisation, and took forever, haha. Luckily for me, the technical simplicity of it didn’t require a great deal of planning to end up with a success.

In the near future I plan to add high definition video and audio outputs to my Xbox. I already own one Xbox component video cable, but the opportunity to further modify this little black box is too tempting to pass up. =) What better way to understand the inner workings of a device than to tear it apart and change it up, right? =D