Controller board advice

[burnaz1124]

Can anyone advice me on which board I need that can handle this many buttons, spinner and trackball (Happ trackball with green boards)

[burnaz1124]

This is the inside. Will the mini-pac Opti work here?

[PL1]

Can anyone advice me on which board I need that can handle this many buttons, spinner and trackball (Happ trackball with green boards)

Will the mini-pac Opti work here?

First step is to add up how many controls and what type of encoder they need.

Microswitch inputs:
14 - P1/P2 player buttons
  8 - P1/P2 joysticks (piggy-back the 4-way stick on the P1 stick inputs)
  8 - Admin buttons
  2 - Mouse buttons
----
32 microswitch inputs -- 30 if you connect the mouse buttons through a separate optical (mouse) encoder

Optical axes:
2 - Trackball X-axis and Y-axis
1 - Spinner axis (usually X-axis)
---
3 optical axes

You can connect 32 microswitch inputs and 3 optical axes using a Mini-Pac Opti or an IPac2.
https://www.ultimarc.com/control-interfaces/mini-pac-en/mini-pac-opti/
https://www.ultimarc.com/control-interfaces/i-pacs/i-pac2/

The easiest way to connect the trackball to the IPac is using either Dupont jumper wires or the Trackball Cable for Opti-Wiz "No-Solder" from GGG to replace the Molex harness.
- You will need to pull the black ground wire out of the Dupont housing because the IPac wiring doesn't have 5v and ground on adjacent pins like the Opti-Wiz, but that is easy to do.
*** Be sure to verify the pinout before connecting each optical axis to your encoder. ***



There is a small lever arm holding each Dupont pin into the housing.

- Push the Dupont pin into the housing.
- Gently insert a straight-pin/probe/X-acto knife tip under the lever and lift it just enough to allow the Dupont pin to slide past.
- Pull out the Dupont pin.



Not 100% sure what type of connections are on your spinner, but they might be Dupont pins so you can use F-F Dupont jumper wires for an IPac or the Mini-Pac Opti wiring for 5v, ground, and the two data lines.  Once again, check the pinout and rearrange wires as needed before hooking it up -- IIRC Ultimarc uses a different wire order for spinners than trackballs.

Remember to connect that large green wire next to the Left Mouse button in your photo to Frame Ground (NOT IPac ground) to bleed off the static charge generated by the acrylic trackball rolling on steel rollers.

One other thing that might be an issue is that your trackball has HAPP "green" boards that often cause problems with backspin because they can't keep up with very rapid changes. (technical explaination here)  You might want to consider upgrading to "red" boards.


Scott

[burnaz1124]

I was able to connect everything and the Ipac software recognizes everything.  How to I configure the buttons so that it works with batocera?

[PL1]

I was able to connect everything and the Ipac software recognizes everything.

Good.   

How to I configure the buttons so that it works with batocera?

I'll let someone who has experience with Batocera answer that.   

You might find some useful info if you put keywords "batocera ipac2" into a search engine. 


Scott

[burnaz1124]

I kind of got it figured out. I know that I have to put the mini-pac opti on mode 2,3 or 4. The problem is that the trackball does not function in all modes and still have trouble mapping the buttons. Keep in mind that I’m using a raspberry pi5 running batocera with an ipac mini-pac opti. Seeking advice please.