Question About PCB and Button Hookups

[Jdurg]

Hey guys.  Looooooooooooooooooong time without a post here.  I think I last posted back in 2007/2008 when I had bought a house and planned on building myself a cabinet.  Got pretty far into it (completely restored a coin door with all its mechs, and built a fully functional control panel) before realizing that I had absolutely no way to fit a cabinet anywhere in my house.  :p  Heh.  I guess size DOES matter. 

Anyway, I recently fractured an ankle and because of that, I have plenty of free time on my hands to work on another project.  I have successfully figured out how to hook up my laptop to my TV and speaker system in the living room, and thanks to the HLSL feature added to MAME, I can get an incredible looking experience playing arcade games on my TV.  Last year, I started to make use of the parts I had in the control panel from my terminated cab build, and put together a very nice looking controller for use on my PS3 when playing SF4.  (Well, almost finished.  Have had a hell of a time trying to get the thing to work consistently.  Lots of intermittent button failures, likely due to the poor wiring job or poor soldering of the wires to the crimp connectors.  I solder the wires to the connectors since the crimps eventually fail on me ALWAYS, and by soldering them on there it makes it much easier to connect/disconnect without fear of pulling the wire out of the crimp).  Anyway, the joystick is still sitting here in my living room looking pretty, and a solid weekend's worth of work from being fully functional.

Having just one joystick is a travesty.  While it can work just fine on my PS3 and my PC (Thanks to the adapter I bought from LizardLick.com last year), what I don't like is how the adapter is basically a controller PCB and that seems to have occasional issues with my PC.  So in the past few days (broke the ankle on Thursday last week, and have been kind of "out of it" thanks to the pain meds) I have put together a design for another joystick, including the artwork.  (Controller 1 has some nice HD art of Ryu fighting Ken, so for Controller 2 I am putting together some nice HD Art of just Ken).

My question has to deal with the button hookups to the PCBs.  I plan on having an adapter in there for use on the PS3, and also plan to use the keyboard gizmo that was originally used in my control panel for use on the PC.  Just need to plug the USB cable into the proper outlet on the back of the joystick once it's done.  I also would like to use a grounding terminal strip to wire all the grounds to, then just make one ground connection to the individual PCBs to keep the wiring tidy and easy to troubleshoot if needed.  So here are my questions:

1:  For each individual button (E.G. Start, Coin/Select, MP, MK, joystick, etc.), can I have two wires soldered into the QD and connect the QD to the microswitch and one wire to the PS3 PCB, and the other to the PC PCB?
2:  Will a grounding strip work if I connect it to both the PS3 and the PC PCBs?
3:  Will there be any issues if I set it up this way?  (I don't think there will be since it will only be connected to one device (PS3 or PC) at one time, and a circuit will be completed between the action terminal on the microswitch, the ground terminal from the microswitch to the grounding strip to the active PCB, and the PCB.  I just want to verify this).

Thanks for any help with this.  I'm looking forward to having the pain go away in my ankle which would allow me to bear some weight on it and let me get further along into the design phase.

[BobA]

Instead of using a PC adapter and a PS3 adapter with the wiring problems when both are used you might be better off with an adapter that works on PS3 and PC as well as xbox.


Dual Strike Controller