Voiding the Warranty

I am waiting (im)patiently for the buttons and stick to arrive. According to the tracking system, they arrived in my city just after midnight, so with any luck, there'll be a second post today unboxing those. Meanwhile, I've carefully peeled off the rubber feet covering four of the six case screws on the button and cracked this thing open. Very easy to open and though I've saved the rubber feet, I'm thinking about putting felt or something on the bottom. I keep the thing in my lap 95% of the time, so the feet do me no good and some softness on my lap would be nice.

Upon opening, I notice it looks smaller inside than the pictures I've seen so far, but that's probably just perspective I guess. Anyway, the button board is not connected via direct soldering like I've seen in other guides. Instead, there is a small ribbon cable connecting the button board to the main PCB, whose soldering connections are covered with a thin strip of what I can only guess is hot glue. While I ponder this conundrum, I pick slightly at the edge of the piece covering connections on the main board and it flips right off. Somebody call the Mayflash plant, the glue ain't holding shit together.

The board is printed with MF-STICK-B1 2009-4-20. So I'll compare to other guides and see if I can get away with not learning anything about how PCBs work and just stand on someone's shoulders. Everything else looks pretty standard, though, I'd like to see what the other side of the PCB looks like to see if there's any way for me to have a PS button on the damn thing so I can respond to fight requests/shit talking.

The model I've been using can access the XBL by pressing start an select together, but that one is a slightly different model from what I can tell and pressing those on mine isnt doing anything Only a single USB for the cord and whatnot. Also, her start an select buttons were remounted with OBSN-30's on the front, so maybe some other wizardry was also afoot there. So we'll see. At the very least I can just keep a pad nearby, but that still won't let me assign my stick to certain ports, so that's a bit of a bummer.

I've also been in contact with several artists who've about getting my artwork put together and they're not making my decision easy. Fortunately, I have time to think about it because I won't need that work done if I dremel this thing into slag, paint it so ugly it doesn't matter, or solder the innards beyond recognition. All of these are likely methods of horrible failure.