Sunday, December 22, 2024
Today my friend’s Steam Deck hits the Black Workmat of Doom™, which to be clear is legally distinct from the Workbench of Doom™. They’re both full of doom, but this one is smaller, and more suitable for smaller items.
And small this is, though large-ish by mobile gaming standards? This is the first generation Steam Deck from Valve. This thing kicked off a well documented surge of tiny computers stuffed into large gamepads that can actually run games pretty well, though IMO the Deck is still the best, mostly hands down to Steam OS and of course the amazing work Valve has done on the Proton tech under the hood that lets Steam OS, which if you didn’t know, is actually linux, to run games so well.
But anyway, this isn’t a history lesson. My buddy got some sticky mess on his face buttons, and that’s no good. Let’s go dig it out.
First and most obviously, shut this boy down. We don’t want this coming back up while we have it apart, and there’s two ways to do this: You have the option to use what Valve calls Battery Storage Mode which will prevent the unit from starting without being plugged into a charger. That said, I’m old school, so I just unplug the cells. To each their own.
Start with the eight screws on the back plate, 4 on top, 4 on bottom. Once that’s done, get a spudger or other blunt instrument like a butter knife, and lever gently on the triggers. The clips holding it together still are located on the grips, which makes good sense, and in my experience are pretty durable, but as always, go slow, and go easy.
Once it’s open you’ll see something like the above: this heat sheild sits between the case and the power distribution hardware, so get that off with a few more screws. It won’t lift free initially as there’s some thermal paste pads between some of those parts, so just give it a little juice and it’ll pop off.
Under there you’ll find this plug, this one’s quite stiff but there’s no clip or trick here: just gingerly tug towards the battery itself, and it’ll pop out. The deck is now without power. Groovy.
After that we’re in standard exploratory surgery mode: start taking screws out and see what comes out. The joystick module attaches with 3 screws and one of the ribbon cables you see there. All these ribbon cables come apart by lifting a small lever on the end of the cable, and then wiggling the ribbon free. Get in the habit of using tweezers to handle these, at all times, whenever possible because any oil from your hands can sit on the tiny contact surfaces in these, and cause strange glitches in your controls.
At the point taken above, I had removed the ribbons (most of them anyway) and the trigger still wouldn’t move, and I figured there had to be a screw underneath the trigger as well. This part kind of sucked: I managed to not break it but I had to pull it apart pretty hard to remove it. That said, there’s a hinge in there, obviously, and that’s all that’s holding the trigger on. Gently but firmly pry the hinge apart. Once you have one out of it’s little nub, the other will follow and you’ll get it off.
Once that last screw is loose, you can lift off the daughter board for this side. This will show you the bumper assembly and the one screw that holds it directly to the back. The black and white conductor there is the connector for the haptic motor on this side. The one in my buddy’s here was weirdly well connected, I never managed to remove it, but since it’s just regular wires and not a ribbon, it’s also much more pliable so I decided it was smarter to just let it be, and turn the daughter board to the side. Didn’t even make a difference but as always, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Finally, remove the bumper assembly which also includes, on it’s reverse, the face-button contact surfaces. Again, watch your ribbons here, there’s a lot around this area and you want to make sure you get em all out in-tact, and all back together before you’re done.
Now it’s more or less the standard script for anything electronic you’re gonna clean: IPA and Q-tips come out. The buttons are all keyed so they really don’t fit into one another’s openings unless you break something. Depending how sticky they are, you might need to give em some help out of the sockets, but in any case, pop em all out.
Dip a Q-tip in your IPA, and make little circles around the openings in the face case, especially above the little ridges, and don’t be afraid to be generous with the IPA. It won’t hurt the case and you don’t wanna do this twice. Then, hold the face buttons between a couple fingers, and repeat the procedure, running the Q-tip around the outside edge of the face button.
Now, take a break. You want these good and dry before you assemble. I personally re-did my nails, which took about 15 minutes, hehe.
Now, reverse all these steps. Go slow: make sure every cable gets back in, everything is reattached. You don’t want extra screws. And of course, once you have it back together, fire it up and use the built-in control pad test application to run through everything and make sure you got it all plugged back in.
There you go!
