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$2 USB Optical rotary upgrade for most joysticks

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griffindodd:

So I was bored, and when I'm bored I usually start trying to burn the house down.

But tonight I managed to hack together something pretty fun, an ultra-cheap optical rotary unit to fit on the end of my Paradise Arcade LED sticks. The title of this post assumes you can pick up a cheap laser mouse for $2 or less, you can do this conversion in about 30 mins without any special tools. I did it because I want to play Ikari Warriors when I finally finish my cab and wanted a way to use my existing sticks rather than having to have dedicated ones just for that game.

Excuse the crappy camera work, but like I said I was bored and feeling 'experimenty'

I'd love to see what some of you guys can do with this idea and how well it would perform if crafted by more expert hands than mine.

Anyway here's the video


Le Chuck:

You could make a stabilizing adapter similar to the Mark Oates 12 position rotary mod and then hook your mouse hack to that.  http://www.markoates.com/rotary/techsupport.htm

It would give you some nice spinner action and fix that encoder rotation issue.  I've always thought Mark's design could be retrofitted to just about any joy out there.  This takes it in a whole new direction.  Well done!  :applaud: :applaud:

ark_ader:

A mini CD?  Pure genius.

Thanks!  :applaud:

brad808:

Really cool. That's the type of stuff I love discovering on this site.

Sent from my Desire HD

BadMouth:

I planned to do rotary sticks someday using the same little rotary encoders that Bender used on his U360 mod, but they aren't cheap.

Was messing around with rotary ideas and came up with something that might be useful.
Instead of having everything attached to the end of the joystick shaft,
the disc would have a "+" shape cut out in the middle and the joystick shaft would be shaped to fit into that like a key with a little wiggle room.
The disc would then be restricted to a flat plane parallel with the bottom of the joystick body.
The disc would stay parallel to the bottom of the joystick body with the laser mouse mounted underneath it.
That way, the weight of the whole apparatus would be attached to the bottom of the joystick body instead of the joystick shaft.

I'm still leaning toward the little rotary encoders, but figured I'd throw this other idea out there for anyone who might want to tinker with the concept.

EDIT: an octagon shaped hole might be better, and you could use an allen head bit on the end of the joystick shaft.

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