Sometimes only a few buttons work, sometimes the wrong ‘color’ is pressed (e.g. press the blue button, but GH thinks the yellow button was pushed), sometimes it’s a combination of these issues.
There’s a few things that can cause this:
- Most Likely: You accidentally flipped-over the ribbon cable. The ribbon cable should the ‘same side up’ as when you took it off.
The only difference is that you feed the wires ‘up’ from the underside (e.g. the button side) of the board to solder.
See a detailed page on Wiring the Guitar Hero Upgrade for lots of details. - Solder bridge where you soldered on the cable. Don’t be embarrassed, it happens to the best of us!
You need to look V E R Y C L O S E L Y with good lighting and magnification at where you soldered the wires onto the board.
Look on both sides, it is possible for one, very thin wire to not go into the hole and just ‘slide sideways’ and touch an adjacent wire.
Look for anything that might be connecting two adjacent solder points together. This wouldn’t be obvious with a voltmeter unless you were specifically looking for shorts.
Quickly running your hot soldering iron between the bridged pads (as if it was a knife) will usually do the trick.
You can see some good examples here on the All About Circuits website. - Sort of the opposite of a solder bridge is a cold solder joint. It may look connected, but it ain’t.
You need to look V E R Y C L O S E L Y with good lighting and magnification at where you soldered the wires onto the board.
Usually, re-heating that joint and a touch more solder will fix the problem
You can learn more than you ever wanted to know about these on the WellPCB website.
I also had an ‘explosive’ experience with a cold solder joint – see my blog post “Where has all the power gone?“ - You got the wrong board. The damn things look a LOT alike. Don’t worry (be happy). Send me a photo of the fret board you took out of your guitar (not the one you bought from me) and I’ll double-check it for you.
If we determine you ordered the wrong board, I’ll send you the right board at no charge, but you’ve got to promise me to return the ‘wrong’ board. You get to pay return postage. It’s a fair deal.