Cheap fight stick take 3

[Yenome]

This is the project log for my cheap fight stick take 3. I had made a post before bout the second one i had done. and while fun i had messed up in the soldering part and had to do a quick fix to get it to working condition I'm taking more time and better planning with this one. Going along with a diff thread i decided to revisit a curved layout they say it feels better for your hands leading to more game time. so going off that meet the donor for the PCB whats better than this.


removed PCB


after taking my Girlfriend nail file to it i got the contacts all cleaned up nicely for some solder. shh don't tell my girlfriend i used her nail file.


After this i decided on my layout. from reading a diff thread i ended up using the Sega layout with moving the 4Th button on the bottom row down a Lil and leaving off the 4Th button on the top row. i also placed the joystick farther off to the left as i had room and it just felt better when i laid my left hand down on the box.






I used a simple program to fig out the matrix for this keyboard. and went with the default for Mame setup so i don't have to worry bout setting most games and can use them right of the back save for a few that i do play with a diff setup. based off my matrix i would need at least 20 connections for my hack. 8 ground and 12 active. from my second cheap stick hack i learned that you can daisy chain just bout anything that matches up. so when you have a common ground for two buttons you can chain them together. say Q and F both use ground 3. i can solder a wire to 3 on the PCB connect it to the ground for Q then run a wire from W to the ground for F. thus both will be connected to ground. but alas most you knew this and are  at this info. I made 20 connector wires using cat5 cable that i cut to 16in length and desheathed and untwisted.


The nice thing bout the keyboard i used is it had a nice long cord on it already, but when i opened it up they had like an entire extra foot inside the thing as well. which mean in a pinch i can use this PCB for my cab when i get to working on it. so the PCB is ready for the solder and i still need to make like 7 connector wires. but it got late and i still wanted to post this before sleep time. so More to come tomorrow. any questions feel free to ask I'm an easy man.

[PIZZ]

I made my first fighting stick out of a tupperware container. Worked pretty well actually until I accidentally smashed it to bits one day after losing a match