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$2 USB Optical rotary upgrade for most joysticks

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Le Chuck:

I ran a thread about what folks were looking for in rotary joys a while ago and the overwhelming majority opinion was that while optical spinner hacks are great if you're going to go through the trouble to rotary hack a joystick it needs to be an 8 or 12 position clicky encoder.  Downside is that those are a ---smurfette--- to wire and don't do a good job of doubling as a spinner in a pinch.  I like this hack and would like to see you anchor the support bar to the joy body to prevent rotation while still allowing vertical flex but don't know what I'm going to do on mine.  Follow in the great work you've done here are copycat an encoder hack.  Either way I'll be standing on the shoulders of others. 

griffindodd:

I'm also going to play with the RGB Switch rotary encoders that I have coming from Sparkfun, it's a different approach so I'll compare the two.

The idea with these is to embed them inside a clear handle/balltop that is split so that the bottom half screws into the joystick shaft and just the top half of the handle/ball rotates with clicks. Looking at the output pins on these encoders I should be able to power them with the optipac spinner interface.

This way we have the whole mechanism for rotary and RGB lighting in the ball top which will convert any hollow shaft stick to both RGB and Rotary, not bad for $3.50

Le Chuck:

I'm anxious to see your prototype.  I think it might be over engineered but I don't want to stop anybody's creative impulses. 

griffindodd:


--- Quote from: Le Chuck on September 12, 2012, 12:58:09 pm ---I think it might be over engineered

--- End quote ---

I love it when people use this term in this forum. I'm currently building a $2500 case to house a mediocre PC to play 30 year old games on a big ass CRT.... I think our entire hobby is the definition of the term  :laugh2:

Look up 'over-engineered' in a picture dictionary there is a picture of Le Chuck sitting on a 3/4 perfect scale model of a Speeder Bike  :droid

Le Chuck:

True.  However, when given the choice of adapting the bottom of a joystick to read rotation vice sawing a balltop in half and making the hemispheres stay connected while rotating independently of each other whilst lighting up and transmitting rotational data well call me old fashioned but...

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