This was clearly the most complex mod I did. I wanted to have the IR dongle always connected, but I hated that stupid dongle and how I had to remove it to ever use that 4th port. I saw this on the www.xbox-scene.com tutorials site, and tried it for myself.

Here's the dongle I got. I should apologize now, I didn't think to use the macro function on my camera so all these pictures are crappy.

I opened it up, you can see the IR receiver.

This IR screen will come in handy later, so I kept it.

A close up of the board, witht he receiver up front.

To access the connector ports, you have to bend up the IR port.

I desoldered the connections, 5 of them for the USB port, and ripped the connector off, so I could remove all of the plastic.

I have these plug ports, I took one and placed a 5 pin/5 wire connection on it for later use. You'll see why.

The back of the board has the holes there for the connector, which I wired to the female pin port.

I took 1 inch pieces of wire and stuck them in the port holes.

I used some hot melt to make a plastic plug as a male connector to these pins.

After a little shaping and soldering, the male port is well formed.

More hot glue to protect the connections.

Using the old connector port, I made this removable controller connection. Now, if I ever get a new case or whatever, I can use the DVD dongle outside of the case should I desire.

All Together

Once Again, with the glue protection showing.

See, it removes.

I can even use the plastic case again.

See?

This is to show the connection for the green LED which indicates when this port is receiving the 12 volts.

To make this dongle automatically switch back to the 4th controller port when a controller is plugged in, we use this 12V 4 connection trip relay so that if 12V are detected on the 4th port the connection is switched. You also see the plastic hard drive chassy, which is the only good spot to put the relay.

I dremeled the plastic out.

Fits nicely.

We need to connect to the ground of the 4th controller port eventually, but we dont' want to ground that out to the whole case, so we insulate the 4th port with electrical tape.

Soldering a ground wire to the controller port.

Soldering 12V from the power supply.

I tapped into each of the controller port wires for port 4.

All of those wires get connected to the side of the case to keep them out of the way.

Labeling and connecting everythign to the relay.

I found these pins to make another male connector this time without the janky paper clip wires, so I did.

Marked the hole for the IR port.

Dremeled it out.

And it's a perfect fit!

With everything, including the LED in.

It's glued to the inside of the plastic.

I had to do some nasty massive case wrecking, but it worked in the end.

The connected relay.

The port off, with the controller indication on and the IR LED off.

And when the port is empty, the IR dongle is on, shown by the LED! There is only one problem, some 3rd party controllers don't draw enoguh current to trip the relay, but all the original Xbox controllers trip it, so I need to remember what I'm connecting where. I don't recommend doing this mod unless you really know what you're doing, it took a ton of time and effort, but it turned out cool!

Well, what's the most boring part about the Xbox? The controller dongle, that little waste of plastic and metal that makes it so when people trip over the cord they don't rip the console off the shelf. Well, that's not good enough, it needs to light up.

This is the virgin device:

Insert something into the seam of the fat side of the dongle. . .

. . .and pry it apart, you should hear the clips pop off.

You should see a white end to it that will slide off, do that. Also, pry off the metal shielding that's not at the end of the port. It should pry towards the wire, just cut it off.

The LED's I had for 6V required 200 Ohms, and I happened to have 4 50 Ohm resistors lying around, so I soldered them together in serial to make a big 200 Ohm resistor. If you have better or different parts, use what you got, this worked for me. I did them like this and they ended up fitting perfectly, which you'll see in a sec.

It should fit into the bottom of the dongle like this. Make sure the leads are sticking out in the direction that they are, pointing towards the back of the dongle.

Put some electrical tape over it so it can't short out.

Put the wire and the port harness back in the bottom half of the plastic. In the following picture, you can tell that one end of the resistor needs to be connected to the hot wire (the wire on the resistor is indicated with the blue line) and the other wire from the resistors needs to be left free for right now.

The next few pictures are difficult to make out, so try to understand the point of it, and you can improvise a little bit. What needs to happen is the LED needs to have the negative side connected to the ground pin indicated above, and the other pin connected to the other end of the resistors. First, cover the controlelr dongle wires with tape, like the picture below.

The next diagram shows you how to connect the resistor, and how to bend it so it reaches the contacts. The "-" end of the resistor needs to connect to the ground.

Put the LED in and line up the pins as they need to be. Solder the contact points to their respective wires and try to keep the LED in the lowest profile possible.

Finally, pop the other half of the dongle plastic on, making sure the LED fits in the shell. Plug it in to make sure the LED works, and if it doesn't, well then re-do the whole thing because you lose. Have fun making things light up!

Click me and all of your internet fantasies will come true.

I made this update guide for several reasons:
1) I am extremely bored
2) I am excited for the X3 to come out
3) All the hardware pictures posted on Team Xecuter's site have me salivating
4) I love taking things apart and after fixing an old car stereo I'm out of projects.

If you want to understand some backgruond before reading this guide, you should see the initial guide I wrote for installing the Xecuter 2.3b lite here. So, the main differences with the new chip and the old chip are that the new pin header uses all of the holes whereas the old chip left 4 empty, there are 2 solder points on the motherboard to enable HDD and LAN activity LED's, and there are 2 solder points to control the reset on eject feature which can get annoying if you've ever run across it.
In regards to the tutorial I made before, one obvious problem is that the d0 wire comes through one of the open pin header holes (Hereby to be referred to LPC holes, which is the technical term for BIOS connecter) While it was valid, it was a great way to arrange the wire, but now that we need those holes, we'll have to figure something else out.

As you can see here, this is what the wire looked like for the X2 mod.

So, now you can see the back of the board, where the d0 is connected. We need to pull the d0 wire out of the hole, so first we need to (on the front) separate the wire I installed from the one coming out of the chip (by lightly touching the soldering iron to the joint and pulling the wires apart) Once done, we'll concentrate on the back.

Once the tape is removed, you need to pull the grey wire out. This can be tricky, since you don't want to pull the solder joint off. What I did is press firlmy against the part of grey wire about 1/4 inch away from the solder joint, and used a pair of pliers to pull the grey wire through the hole.

You can see that I left the grey wire really long when I did the initial mod. This paid off, since now I need to re-route it outside the edge of the board.

After the wire is out, you want to tape it down pretty quick. This is so you don't accidentally yank it and separate the d0 point, and so that it doesn't flop around and get tangled everywhere.

Finally, flip the board back over and tape down the wire on the top. Leave enough room so that you'll be able to attach it to the d0 wire coming out of the port on the chip, which is about what I have left in the picture.

Next is the LPC expander. Rather than de-solder the old pin assembly, I took a spare I had around and made something to fill the 4 empty holes. Here's the spare.

I removed the 4 pins on an end of it with some needle-nose pliers.

I then snapped off the black part for the 4 empty holes. It was easy to grip with the pliers and snapped right apart.

Finally, I put the 4 pins back in the black thing and had a finished pin expander.

Using the same procedure as I did in the original mod chip installation guide I soldered the new pin assembly into the 4 empty holes. Just to make sure they were straight enough, I put the X2 chip on the new pins and the they fit into the holes.

Next are 2 points on the back of the motherboard which will be linked to the LAN and HDD activity LED's. The area of the board I am focusing on is right under the corner nearest the IDE connecter (long and black with about 40 pins) and the LAN port in the back. Find the 2 spots pointed to in the image (Sorry it's so blurry, check the team Xecuter X3 guide for better pics, and mask around them with electrical tape, so you don't accidentally hit anything.

Because I am doing this with the intention of one day soldering it to a completed X3 chip, I left a lot of extra wire (about 18 inches) and I recommend you do the same, since you can always cut it to accommodate your mod. I soldered the wires so they were facing the edge of the board for easy wrap around to the front, much like the d0 wire. I labled them with some masking tape flags, and taped them down for now.

The other 2 wires needed are for the reset and eject fixes which the new chip can control. To do this, you need wires coming out of the button controls to connect to the chip. In the image, I have highlighted which wires coming out of the yellow connector towards the front of the xbox need connections. This was the trickiest part of this project, but what I recommend is taking some long, multi-strand wire, stripping 1/4 of an inch, flattening it out, tinning it with some solder (applying some solder to it so it's more solid than free wires) then trimming it with some scissors so it fits alongside the metal casing in the white plug. Once it fits, slip it in and just apply some solder to the wire, it should take (travel on its own as a liquid to the connection point) and make your wires complete.

It's hard to see here, but I used electrical tape to fasten the blue wire and its associated yellow wire together. This not only shields it, but makes sure neither wire will be pulled out. I labeled them with masking tape flags and tucked them over where the chip will be installed.

So that's that. I just put the motherboard back in the box, screwed everything in, and put my X2 back in where it belongs. You'll notice if you try it that the X2 won't go all the way on since the d0 connecter gets int he way of the new pins, but it still makes a connection so don't worry. When it's time for X3, it should be a quick, simple process to open the board up, trim and solder the 4 wires, and pop on the pin header. Please feel free to ask me any questions about my guide at my e-mail. Thanks a lot for reading, happy modding!

As we all know, Jenn and I have a baby named the Baron. Specifically, a baby map turtle named The Baron von Deutschenheim the Second. When we got him, or should I say before we got him, I knew he'd need a home so I made him an awesome one. First, I built the tank itself. Now, you may know where he lives now, unfortunately, dad and I tried to re-caulk this tank and it sprung a series of leaks we never got to finish fixing, so it's in my house in Villa Park accumulating dust. One day though, he'll live in it again.

The tank is made out of 1/4 inch clear acrylic with one side lowered for the filter. The lowered filter position allows for the water to be lower but there still be dry space at top. I used the foil and paper towel method to test for leaks, and she passed awesomely!

This picture is the same, but deleting it would screw up the number order of my pictures.

A close up of the strengthened joint, it's epoxy, silicon caulk, and reinforced acrylic 90 degree bends.

The opposing dropped corner.

So, his royalty will like a place to sit out and bask in the sun as well as a place to hide, like a cave. He also needs to be able to easily get up on it, and it should be pretty. I used some 1/8 inch acrylic to make a custom dock feature. Here's the simple piece I started with.

The first bends, done with a light butane torch.

The acrylic stretches when it is bent so the bends don't have to be straight lines, as you can see. Who knew I was a sculptor too?

I'm inspecting the rig, I want the height to be right above the water line set by the lowered edge, so I made this little rig to hold it steady while I worked.

Preparation for the firing, notice my heat prevention gloves.

BURN!

THE MELTEY FIRE!!! The acrylic bubbles if it gets too hot.

Heating is a slow process.

Pensive.

Slowly taking shape, thanks for takin pics Jenn.

The bubbles are where it's heated up a lot, but they make it easy to expand and bend. It's really starting to take a dropped ramp shape.

The beginnings of the cave.

Beginning the drop side.

The ramp from the front, in formation.

Ok, here's the rock structure, if I do say so myself it turned out spectacular, it looks really natural and flowing.

Again.

Side view, with an extender at the bottom. And a hottie in the background, studying.

This is where my man is gonna sit when he's sunning!

Seems the ramp is too short, think I'll need to extend it.

Closeup on the drop side extension.

Here's the extension on the ramp, with the whole unit installed in the tank. Temporarily, to make sure it fits.

Fits great, sits on little nubs glued to the side of the tank.

The dock out again.

It may look ugly, but this is the extension held on with hot glue and acrylic scraps. It looks better in the end, and I did this knowing it.

More.

More.

Well, I want this thing to look beautiful, so I'm gonna make it look like rock. First, I covered the inside of the tank with laminated paper.

So many repeat pictures!

The dock is in, see it fits. See why soon!

It's in.

So Adam (my awesome resident) and I went to the volleyball courts and stole some janky ass sand.

Using the lid of my small tank as a sieve, we filtered out the bad sand from the good sand.

See the fine nice sand?

This adhesive is used to put countertop laminant down, I laid it on thick.

Me painting the dock in the covered tank.

More cover.

And now do you get it??? It looks like rock since the sand sticks to the glue!

The underside too, which turned out to be a problem. . .

The weight of the sand caused cracks which I had to repair.

Hidden and covered!

Finished, with some stray pieces coming off over time.

The repaired underside.

Supported by nubs.

So here's the beautiful tank with the pic of a turtle in there, all ready to be enjoyed!