1st Party GC Controller to Dual Axis Pot Joystick for Arcade

[FezPirate]

So I got it in my head that a 4 person stand up arcade machine for smash brothers would be totally awesome!

After a bit of looking around online I finally found some dual axis potentiometer joysticks (OM201bM4?) that I think would work.

Data Sheet for joystick:
http://www.tme.eu/en/Document/ebd83969a ... om201b.pdf

However here is the catch:

I remember reading somewhere that the GC controllers use 10K Pots for the joysticks, but when I took mine apart yesterday and measured it it seemed to have a range from 0 - 24KΩ resistance range for the left/right part of the joystick and a 0 - 30Ω resistance range for up/down.

This kinda seemed odd to me so I figured it was time to ask the people that know more about this then I do. (You guys!)

Is this how they should be?

If so is there a designed deadzone in the left/right part of the joystick or is that addressed in the software and they just wanted to be difficult?

Oh also my plan for this has been to take the pcbs from a few controllers and just wire out the buttons & a joystick from each controller to a panel. If you have any info on the best ways to wire the buttons that would be awesome as well.

If I can get a little help with some questions along the way I will be glad to document my progress to share with you guys.

I havn't done much for PCB mods before but have played with microcontrollers a bit but in general I am still rather new to electronics/modding... Programing on the other hand I'm not all that bad at.

 

[tom10122]

Re: 1st Party GC Controller to Dual Axis Pot Joystick for Ar

Well I think it would be more sensitive, you move it up halfway and it would register as up, I think you could add a resistor to each one to get it down to 10k

 

[Mr. Hooker]

Re: 1st Party GC Controller to Dual Axis Pot Joystick for Ar

since you have all th room you need, you could use a microcontroller to change the values of the input, to what ever output you need. then its just a matter of code.

 

[superben51]

Or you could just rip the pots off the controller and not worry about anything.

 

[FezPirate]

Re: 1st Party GC Controller to Dual Axis Pot Joystick for Ar

I guess I may not have been clear with what pot was measured...

I measured the pot that I removed from the GC PCB.

So if I dropped the joystick that only as a 0-10K range wouldn't that make it so I couldn't actually reach 2 of the directions?

The pots from the GC controller when the joystick is centered sit at 12.5K and 15K (above the 10K range of the replacement joystick pots)

I do like the idea of dropping a microcontroller in there and I could easy do the coding for that but I figure I would be loosing some sensitivity in there. (Probably not enough to notice but it would probably bug me knowing that I would be loosing it.) If I can manage to do it without having to throw a microcontroller in there I would prefer that solution.

Correct me if I am wrong here but the pcb is expecting a 0-30K signal from one of the original pots and a 0-25k signal from the other one. Adding resistors to this help if I would be replacing the original pots with 0-10K pots.

Do you guys know if 3rd party controllers use different pots for the joysticks on their PCBs? Possibly something with a 0-10K range? (Guess I would loose sensitivity that way also though. But I wouldn't have to worry about having 2 pots with different ranges)

 

[Ashen]

Re: 1st Party GC Controller to Dual Axis Pot Joystick for Ar

You dont need to do any of that bullflax, this is silly. Those analog joysticks will work fine.

 

[FezPirate]

Re: 1st Party GC Controller to Dual Axis Pot Joystick for Ar

I went and picked up some 10K pots from radio shack yesterday. I'll be soldering some test leads onto the GC controller today and using a breadboard to test the pots here in a bit.

 

[FezPirate]

Re: 1st Party GC Controller to Dual Axis Pot Joystick for Ar

Well, I did a dumb and managed to rip off two of the pads for the joystick on the PCB... Now I'm trying to trace where those go back to...