You should have your SNES console all pulled apart before starting this tutorial. If not then click here to see how to open up your SNES console.

Soldering Iron     Solder     Solder Wick or Solder Sucker     Electrical Tape (or similar)     Lengths of wire     Veroboard     555 Timer     7493 Counter     Tri-Colour LED (the one with 4 legs)     Super Glue (or hot melt glue gun)

Okay now that you have your console all opened up, you need to pull the controller ports connection from the mainboard. Now the annoying thing here is, to get to the LED you need to desolder the control ports which can be a bit tricky if you dont have a solder sucker - the next best thing is solder wick. So desolder all the joints holding it in, and then unclip the circuit board from the plastic housing, it should come out easily (so long as you desoldered all the legs properly).

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Now desolder the two legs and take out the old LED.

Thats the first part done, now the next part will take you a fair amount of time...

by retrobrad - 09 June 2007

Now that you're happy with it, put your SNES back together and test it! Tthis circuit does have it's drawbacks, in that it cycles through 8 different 'colours' but one of these is an 'off' condition so really there are 7 colours and then blank. I want to make it so it never has an 'off' condition. I'll upload details of the new circuit when i get the time.

Once it is all soldered in, you need to 'fix' it to the controller board and bend the LED legs so that it fits into the LED slot (just as the old LED did) once it's all in place - glue it down. (or whatever else you can think of to hold it in)

Now that you have your flasher circuit all built, you need to solder in the power wires, we get this from where the old LED was (well sort of) - Solder the Ground wire to the cathode connection of where the old LED was (the left hole on the board - see photo) but we don't wan't to solder the +ve wire to the Anode (the right hand side hole) because it first goes through a series resistor - So we need to solder it before the resistor, (see photo for where to solder the wire) PS don't worry about the extra resistor ive got on my board - i was just experimenting with different flashing speeds.

Now you need to make the flasher circuit, I used veroboard to make mine but you could also fabricate your own circuit board or use experimenters board etc... Anyway, just follow the circuit diagram here and then move onto the next step.