Fishing Rod fried my Dreamcast?

[Want2Fish]

Hoping that somebody here will know more about DC repair/troubleshooting than I do & this will make sense because I'm at a loss. I have one of those fishing controllers (not a 3rd party one or anything sketchy) for use with SEGA Bass Fishing and such. My Dreamcast was working just fine until I plugged that in. On it's next boot, I'm essentially stuck at the clock setup screen. My controllers don't do anything & nothing on the VMU screen. After searching online I found out about the issues with the Controller board and thought I fried that soemhow. I replaced the entire controller board, and no dice. Got an entirely new Dreamcast and tried to play with the fishing rod again because I ahdn't realized that's what did it...and it borked this one too!!!! Powers on, I can hear the disc drive spin up too. Fan's running all as usual...just zero communication from the controllers.

Does this make any sense to anyone? Troubleshooting tips? I haven't a guess as to what to start replacing at this point.

[xzer0PL]

Im not a fortune teller. Take multimeter and see. First in rod plug, later in controller board this resistor-fuse (F1), later to motherboard.
https://dreamcast.wiki/F1_fuse_repair
Pozdro 600

[Tarnish]

If you're lucky, you just blown the F1 fuse on the controller boards, a common issue that's possible to fix. Tho replacing the controller board should have fixed that, unless either that board also had the fuse issue or you didn't connect the ribbon cable all the way to make proper connection (happened to me before), or indeed something more serious happened, but the fuse is supposed to prevent that from happening. It does make it sound like something is weird with that fishing rod tho.

[megavolt85]

the only thing that comes to mind is that the fishing rod cable closes and because of this, the F1 fuse on the controller board burns out

[Want2Fish]

Thanks for the replies! I think I've figured it out. I just had supremely bad luck back to back that made the issue more confusing than it really was. To make this as brief as possible, the fishing rod burned out my first controller board (didn't realize that it was the rod at the time causing this) so I replaced the entire controller board with one from eBay. That board wouldn't power controllers either. I assumed that something more serious (Power supply or mobo) was borked. Got another Dreamcast which powered controllers just fine...until I plugged in the fishing rod and blew that one too.

Took a multimeter to the replacement controller board I bought...it already had a ruined F1 fuse!!! Shorting the fuse allowed that DC to see controllers again. Here's where it gets interesting. I took apart the fishing rod...



Two of the pins are soldered together! I'm 99.9% sure this isn't normal & is causing the F1 fuses to blow. Shorted my other F1 fuse and that DC is just fine as well. I've ordered some controller board repair kits to replace the F1 fuses & I'll fix the short on the fishing rod then report back here. I would fix the shorted pins & test immediately, but with both of my DC consoles operating on shorted F1 fuses I'd just blow the whole thing if my hunch is wrong.

As an added bonus, here are some higher res pics of the fishing rod internals I took for anyone who's curious.
https://files.catbox.moe/kwg88q.jpg
https://files.catbox.moe/imtyzr.jpg
https://files.catbox.moe/2hqwrf.jpg
https://files.catbox.moe/ellj1u.jpg

[megavolt85]

Two of the pins are soldered together! I'm 99.9% sure this isn't normal & is causing the F1 fuses to blow.

no, that's how it should be.
you need to check to which pin the blue wire closes.

[Tarnish]

Two of the pins are soldered together! I'm 99.9% sure this isn't normal & is causing the F1 fuses to blow. Shorted my other F1 fuse and that DC is just fine as well. I've ordered some controller board repair kits to replace the F1 fuses

It might be worth going with resettable fuses in case it ever happens again.

[Want2Fish]

no, that's how it should be.
you need to check to which pin the blue wire closes.

I'll take a look, i had no idea. Kinda new to this. thanks

It might be worth going with resettable fuses in case it ever happens again.

agreed. that's what i'm replacing it with, so that's at least 1 thing i'm doing correctly.

[Want2Fish]

the only thing that comes to mind is that the fishing rod cable closes

blue wire closes.

Okay I must be misunderstanding or just ignorant, but what does "closes" mean in this context? I'm new to working on electronics/soldering. Why is it the blue wire specifically that matters? I'm sure you've already gathered which pin the blue wire is connected to from the pictures, so I fear that I'm not understanding what you guys are referring to. Are there certain points I should be checking with my multimeter against that blue wire's solder point?

The blue wire connects to this pin.

[megavolt85]

you need to check if the blue wire connects to any other wire inside the insulation.