I picked up a Steam Controller some time back and have used it quite a bit. It wasn’t until recently that I looked at a tear down and thought it would be fun to hack it a bit. So I’ll be trying to follow along on here with what I find out. I have at least my first few steps figured out.
- Figure out a rough schematic
- Starting from the iFixit Teardown, I need to figure out how the MCU, sensor ICs and buttons are connected
- I’ll only need a pretty standard DMM for this part
- I’ll also probably skip most of the power supply circuitry. At first glance, I can’t see what FW would need to be involved with the power supply
- Get some tools
- I’ll need a proper debug connector. The footprint from the teardown looks like a Tag-Connect TC2030-CTX. It looks like a nice small footprint as far as debug connectors go. And SWD is pretty common for Cortex-M parts.
- Wireshark and the steam controller plugin for parsing packets.