How to Mod your DS with LED's



This is a tutorial on how to put led's in your DS and mod it.





The first thing you must do is open your DS. To open your DS just follow these steps or you can watch this video some guy made.


1. take the battery cover off the back.
2. remove the battery
3. Remove all 7 screws on the bottom with a tri-wing screw driver. You can get one on ebay.




4. Take the back cover off
5. remove all the ribbons from the mother board connections and the wifi cable next to the DS slot.


6. remove all 4 screws in the white circles on the motherboard




7. Remove the R and L buttons and the other buttons.

8. Now you have the mother board detached from the DS

9. flip your motherboard over and find the power LED's next to the headphone port.



10. To replace the leds you must get the right size leds. The ones I bought are These. They are size 0603 (I would recomend blue). They are very small but if you mess up soldering you wont realy ruin your ds even if the connections are touching each other so dont get all shaky that will mess you up.

11. Now that you have the leds you must break your other ones off or if you want you could melt the solder off and pull the led up.

12. Get a nice soldering Iron with a realy fine tip. And solder the new leds on in place of the one you want. they label them so you know what they are. so if you want a different power led color you break off the green low power led is red charge is orange

Here is what it looks like when its done



You can do the same thing on the GBA SP and GBA






Now this is another DS LED mod but this one is way harder you dont realy need leds but it looks alot better with them.



You should have your DS still open if not just follow my steps above.

you must get to the top of your DS so you have to open the top part by taking off the rubber pads next to the screen with a small screw driver.





1.Then once you got all the 4 screws out put your fingernail in the slit on the side and pop it open.
2. The top piece will be separate now and that is the part you need to mod.
3. So pick a design ( I picked the DS sign) draw it out on your DS.
4. Now that you have your design drawn out you can cut it out. I would recomend a soldering Iron with a x-acto knife tip on it.
The one I got was a black and decker one from home depot and it came with x-acto knife tip.




You can also use a dremel but its not too acurate.

5.Now cut your design out. Make sure you dont slip with your x-acto knife or you will cut your DS bad (I did this a few times).







6.Now if you want to add plastic in the hole just get some thin acrylic plastic or get some metal and put it under it.
7. cut your acrylic plastic to fit your design and glue it in their. add some paper or tin foil under it so it looks better.



8.now you are done if you dont want to add leds but if you add leds its alot cooler.

Adding leds to your design



1. You will need the same LED's as I said above. these They are size 0603. You will also need some thin wire you can get from .
2.get your leds all soldered to the wire.






3. Now you need a power source for them. I blew a fuse trying to find these but they work.

On the back side of the DS mother board you will see BT- connection next to the power button. This is where you solder your - end of your led wire to.



Your positive wire will connect the MOD1 connecton next to your right D pad button. I kind of messed this one up so I had to glue it.



If you have some leds that need another power source (Like I had becuse red and blue dont work together) you can connect negitive to one of the bottom connections not used for anything but ground positve is hard to explain just look at the picture you can enlarge by clicking on it.



4.Now test your connection by attaching a battery up to your motherboard and clicking the power button. The lights should light up and then power off again.

click to enlarge

5. Now you have to put your DS back together. But if you put any kind of metal under your leds you must cover your connections with something so they dont connect to the metal I used hot glue.

6. Congragulations you have modded your DS.

To see more pictures click Here