I still use my Xbox 360 after all these years. Not as often as I once did of course, but at least once a month its up and running to play games. The Xbox 360 controller uses a small battery pack to hold two AA’s or could take a sealed unit with Ni-Mh batteries and be charged with a custom cable. As these are loong out of production by Microsoft, any stock you find is DOA as the cells have died.
I’m not a fan of AA’s as I keep having to find more, and they seem to die or leak after a few months of non-use. I also have a bunch of 18650 LiFePo4 cells around as leftovers from my work. LiFePo4 is nice here as its far closer to the voltage range of AA’s than the LiPo’s that people used to do back in the day. I like to think this puts less stress on the regulation circuitry.
In a fit of frustration, in a few hours I threw together this PCB, which is a LiFePo4 charger + battery protection + battery contacts. The whole thing is designed to be able to be assembled by JLC to keep it easy. This does mean the battery contacts and USB-C are not optimally placed for battery pack size, as I instead optimised for cheap assembly.
The end design is very engineer styled (ugly af). But works well, with controllers lasting longer than any gaming session and allowing easily charging by USB-C.
I’m posting this and publishing the files so that hopefully someone will make a nicer one for me, but at the least it can serve as a reference for a quick and dirty LiFePo4 setup.
All the files are posted at https://github.com/Ralim/Xbox-360-Battery-Pack.