Esoteric Tip of the Day #2: Charging the Un-Chargeable Battery

I have an XBox 360 with a couple of wireless controllers that have rechargeable battery packs and this thing called a “Play ‘n Charge” cable that allows the controllers to charge over USB while still being usable. I picked up one of my controllers after a long (read: months) period of not using it to find that it had completely discharged. Not only that, but it wouldn’t even charge over the cable; the charge indicator light turned from red (charging) to green (charged) almost immediately. For a long time, I thought I just had a faulty battery and ran off of AAs. Then I found this thread.

Disclaimer: I am not an electrical engineer. Well, technically I am, but seriously … I’m not an electrical engineer. I may have gotten the details of this wrong.

All rechargeable batteries will lose their charge if not charged in a long enough period of time. Apparently, if a battery gets sufficiently discharged, it will have trouble accepting a charge at all. The XBox will then become confused, interpreting the inability to pass current through the battery to charge it as the battery being fully charged (hence the “a few seconds of red light, followed by a green light” phenomenon).

Here’s the two step solution:

1. Plug the controller (with rechargeable battery attached) into the XBox with the Play ‘n Charge cable. The light on the end of the cable should turn on and be red.
2. If the light stays red for a couple minutes without turning green, keep the controller plugged in. Otherwise, unplug the controller from the Play ‘n Charge cable, count slowly to five, and go back to step 1.

After some number of tries (nominally less than 50), the XBox and battery should finally figure it out and charging should begin.

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