Don't spill wine on your PS3 controller

Posted April 25th, 2011 in Hardware & Gadgets

It's pretty obvious really - you should never spill any drinks on computer hardware. And yet I've twice spilled red wine on hardware. The first time was a few years ago on a Toshiba laptop keyboard and just a couple of weeks ago on a Playstation PS3 dualshock controller.

The reason I've written this post is that it might help some people searching the internet for the reason why their PS3 controller suddenly stopped working for what may seem no reason at all...

Not working properly

We have a PS3 with two controllers. For some reason one of them stopped working. After a lot of fiddling around I discovered that the lights 1 and 2 didn't light up at all, but lights 3 and 4 did. So the controller would turn on but didn't appear to do anything.

After giving it a bit of charge and switching it on, it would work OK for a few seconds and then start sending random controls to the Playstation even though it wasn't being touched. It would always end up on the shut down PS3 screen, and there was no way to cancel from this even using the other controller. Shutting down using the on/off button on the PS3 was the only way to switch it off.

What the oracle said

After doing a bit of Googling, the most common suggestion was either that the battery in the controller had gone bad, to try fully charging on either the PS3 or a PC, or pressing the reset button on the controller.

None of these did anything other than the random stuff I mentioned earlier, although I didn't try replacing the battery unit and at this stage hadn't opened it up.

Opening it up

Given that the controller appeared to be pretty much munted, I figured it didn't really matter what I did to it, so I opened it up. Immediately I saw there were some drops of a red substance in a nunber of places on the plastic interior and circuitry.

Then I remembered a couple of weeks back I'd spilled a glass of red wine. I guess somehow it managed to find its way into the controller and the rest is history.

Maybe you spilled a drink on yours to (or just near it)

So if your PS3 controller appears to have stopped working for no real reason and starts sending random commands to your Playstation, then perhaps you spilled wine or a soda drink on or near it at some point in the past.

I hope not, for your sake, and it simply needs a reset, full charge or new battery so you don't have to fork out for a new one like I did. Oh well, at least I have a nice new RED one now!