So I’m kind of new to electronics but I understand a fair bit. The power button he wires in connects the board directly to the ground through the grounding pad and one of pins for the port to the button. This bypasses the capacitive touch sensor on the 360 slim and turns it into a mechanical button.
How?
Isn’t this the same as connecting the board->ground and pin->button->ground?
If so, could I do that to use a mechanical keyboard button for the power button?
Is there any reason you can’t wire them to the port on the bottom left that the ribbon cable for the stock buttons connect to?
Any help would be appreciated, I’m working on a total overhaul of my old 360 slim and this is going to be a big part of the aesthetics when I’m done.
You can also ask here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/c/askelectronics
Thanks for posting this! I was getting frustrated ten minutes ago about how my roommate’s dog keeps ejecting my 360 S’s disk tray. I’d use an E, but I don’t want to lose a USB port. I might have to do something like this.
Glad to hear it helps! I’m personally using it to move the button for a custom shell! Any chance you’d know how to explain how it works?
My guess is that the original power button shorts its trace to ground and the console is looking at that resistance to tell whether it’s pressed. Adding a replacement button just means putting something that can connect that trace to ground on demand.
Touch buttons usually work via capacitive coupling: they don’t check for decreased resistance but impedance (AC resistance), which means alternating voltage (often single-polarity, e.g. a 0/5 V square wave, to avoid the need for a negative voltage rail) is applied to them. While conductivity (inverse resistance) allows DC to flow or AC to flow in phase with voltage, capacitive admittance (inverse impedance caused by capacity like a nearby finger) allows only AC to flow, 90° behind sine voltage (proportional to change in voltage, which is 0 for DC voltage). A short to ground is the lowest resistance or impedance possible so if the system just checks for current flow (usually by monitoring voltage drop over a resistor) at any phase, like most touch sensors do, it will see a big current flow (maybe too big for some badly designed ones, so careful!) and register a touch. Some touch sensors use the body’s capacitance to complete an LC or RC circuit, in which case a short won’t work.
Alternatively, the touch button’s module already contains the touch-detecting electronics powered from DC, and pulling a signal line to ground to indicate touch detection. That requires 3 wires to the button board though and active electronics on it.
