KeyWiz, Happs Wiring Solution for Noob

[atarikari]

Hi -

I searched the forums for this type of post w/o luck, so apologies if this is (very) old news. 

I recently finished a controller, using Happs 8-way, a few buttons (Cherry microswitches), a KeyWiz 1.0 and some 8-gague wire from Radio Shack.  It works great, but I eventually figured out  the joystick switches needed to be wired as Normally Closed to work, whereas all other buttons worked with the standard Normally Open.

I've never seen this mentioned in any of the guides, and think it would be helpful to anyone else putting together a setup for the first time. My testing process was fairly exhaustive--although there could easily be something I'm overlooking--and I wondered if this was common knowledge or not.

- Mike

[NoOne=NBA=]

They all need to be wired to the Normally OPEN tabs.
You may have different switches, with the tabs being different on each type however.

If you wire them to the normally closed tab, they will all show as being pushed on the KeyWiz--unless they really ARE pushed.

Take a closer look at your switches for the NO / NC markings, and I will bet you find that they are different on the buttons and joystick switches.

[spystyle]

.

[atarikari]

That's a great tutorial, wish I'd had it before

And yeah, maybe the switches are wired in a non-standard (?) way on the Happs 8/4-way. I'll check it out.

The crazy thing was that wiring all four joystick switches in what I thought was NO made Left and Right not work (using GhostKey), and Up yeild a closed circuit for Up, Left and Right; and Down yeild a closed circuit for Down, Left and Right. Flipping the connections on the KeyWiz didn't work as I'd expect: Left or Right didn't yeild their respective switch, plus Up and Down, but rather actually crashed the GhostKey program.

Dunno. Occam's razor says it's the joystick, but testing the L/R switches with a loose Cherry switch (same as the ones for the buttons) still yeilded no signal or crashed GhostKey when paired with the conditions above. The inputs on the KeyWiz that I'm currently using for L/R are L/R on Player 2, because I couldn't get L/R to work for Player 1, despite using the same setup in both cases.

I likely just got lost in all the wiring .

[NoOne=NBA=]

It sounds like you've got some serious cross-wiring going.

You might want to double check where the COM tabs are on the switches, as well.
Those should all connect together (daisy-chaining is easiest), and end at the GND pin on the KeyWiz.

It sounds to me like the Left/Right are NOT grounding through their own COM tabs, but ARE grounding through the Up/Down switches when the Up/Down are depressed.

[atarikari]

Hmm...interesting...I'll try to make some time to open it up and test this weekend, but now that it's working I've been using it mostly to play this fantastic game:

http://www.insertcredit.com/archives/000146.html

Thanks again for the help.

- Mike