Analog VS Directional

[BobSeager]

Anyone know if I can wire an 8-directional joystick to the xbox pcb analog joystick solder points (for up-down-left-right and diagonals)? The directional pad points are ludicrously small...trying to make another wireless 360 arcade stick.

Wiring to the analog is a bit outside my knowledge...analog has an x and y axis but i dont know how a joystick would interpret that...the directional pad has four direction buttons to solder to (u,d,l,r) but i'm screwed on that, i can't even follow the traces to try and salvage a conneciton. The analog only has x axis and y axis (two solder points). I think I'm eff'd on my current project...

...frustrated

The joystick is essentially the same as this...4 points (u,d,l,r) and you just solder the u,d,l,r from the xbox d-pad to the concurrent points on the stick...but thats not an option anymore. The analog just has one button on the pcb for x-axis, and one button for y-axis. Maybe I can connect y to either of the up/down points on the joystick (and same with x and left/right)? That's about the best I can come up with

[CoFree]

wow
never even thought of doing that man.
keep us up on your progress

[sadalius]

I'm not even sure that will work. If I remember correctly, D-pad signals are digital, while stick signals are analog. I could be wrong through.

[BobSeager]

I think you may be right...UGH...this was so much easier the first time...i made the mistake of using 22 gauge wire which is way too big and heavy for the tiny points. The first time I did this I used much much smaller wire. The bad thing is the d-pad contacts, aside from being the smallest points I've ever worked on, are encased in plastic and you really only have a tiny bit of room to work in once you scrape it away. The plastic melts when you try to contact the points.

[BobSeager]

I have one more idea...maybe futile but I am not ready to completely abandon (I already have the box built and buttons on their way, along with all wires except these 8 done).

Does anyone have experience re-tracing points (drawing your own lines on the pcb)?

And if so, how'd it go?

[BobSeager]

I don't know why I didn't think of this sooner...

Actually I do, cause today I went home, drank a beer, thought about it, and came up with this-

I used toothpicks to block off the connections which, I hope are still good, and got solder blobs on the tip of the gun. Then I scrapped the solder blob off and it fell over the tiny connection...hope it connected. I won't know if this works until all my buttons are in my box and connected, then ill solder the board to the microswitches on the buttons and joystick.

Now I've got big solder blobs to connect to, should work great in theory, but I may have blown it already by relentlessly scrapping away.

Beer, is there anything it can't do?

[CoFree]

hahaha
keep us up on this man.

good luck

[BobSeager]

Ugh so it took me forever to get the pins soldered but they worked, all the buttons were mapped to teh cherry microswitches so I simply plugged them into the buttons and I was done wiring!

Then when i went to mount it in the box and one of the wires on the the d-pad snapped...No traces to follow because it's a ground it doesn't come through to the back of the board. Damnit! I may go ebay for a broken 360 wireless controller in order to get another cheap pcb. So close!

[sadalius]

I hate when stuff like that happens. It seems it happens to me alot, LOL!! But you'll get it. Persistence is a virtue that has to be learned!!

[BobSeager]

Well, damn. I need to order a few more microswitches so I will probably postpone progress on this for awhile. The box looks gorgeous tho, I'll get some pics up when I revive it.

[lilrevuk]

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview ... erthread=y

Don't know if this will help you, but I came across this from a link posted on #fw....