[SJM4306] grabbed a used PlayStation 3 from a game store that was going out of business. He got a pretty good deal on what had undoubtedly been the floor model for a number of years. The one real problem was the controller that came with it. The thing was so unclean that he literally used gloves to disassemble and sanitize it. It worked just fine after that,until he discovered that it wouldn’t charge from the USB port as it’s meant to. but he managed to replace the charging circuitry with some of his own.
When cleaning the insides of the controller he found there were numerous deposits of sludge which he qualities to spilled soda. This need to have damage one of the chips responsible for charging because he was probing an unstable 2V rather than the regulated 5V which must be coming in on the USB lines. His option was to desolder the USB port in buy to separate its 5V pin from the PCB. He then etched a tiny board to host a MAX1555 charging IC. With the new hardware in place the controller is back in action.