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Spinner and Rotary Help
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muzland:
Just snagged 2 arkanoid spinners from a seller on ebay.

The plan is to wire these to a mouse hack. They seem in pretty good order but need a good clean.

Can anybody tell me the pin outs from the Taito optic board on these. There are 4 pins so I guess +5V, GND and the 2 direction pins. Not sure which is which though.

What do I need to be able to take the knob off the top?

Also got a genuine SNK Rotary from the same seller. Again in pretty good order but needs cleaning. I can't seem to work out how to get the top off on this either.

I am going to build my own interface for this to take the 12 inputs and output either a clockwise or anti-clockwise pulse. I can then wire this to 2 standard inputs on my encoder. The electronics expert at work has tipped me off on a good (and extremely cheap) way of doing this. The guy is a genius. It took him all of 1 minute to explain a solution to me. He has even lent me the dev kit and I started writing the code for the micro-controller today. I have briefly tested the code and it seems to work (not wired the joystick in yet though).

Here is what the electronics guru recommended..........

Buy the Texas Instruments eZ430-F2013 Development Tool for $20.

For this you get a full C/C++ IDE.
USB Debugger/Programmer for the microcontroller.
1 microcontroller with easy access to all 14 pins!

Additional microcontroller boards are $10 for 3.

This micro-contoller only has 8 i/o ports. These can be configured individually as inputs or outputs.

So how do we get 12 into 8 and still leave 2 for the outputs. Centre stage the electronics guru again.....

Wire outputs from pins 1, 4, 8 and 11 together. This forms the new input 1.
Wire outputs from pins 2, 5, 9 and 12 together. This forms the new input 2.
Wire outputs from pins 3, 6, 10 and 13 together. This forms the new input 3.

I am assuming that pin 7 is the common on the rotary switch connector (it is on mine when I put the multi-meter on it).

This has turned a 12 bit input mask into a 3 bit input mask and we have retained all of the directional information. So we only need 3 inputs and 2 outputs.

The other cool thing about this board is that it already has one of the i/o ports wired to a green LED. I am making it flash once for a CW pulse and twice for a ACW pulse so I am getting very visual feedback from the code and a really quick way of telling if it is working correctly.

Question 1: How long should the CW and ACW pulses last for?

Question 2: Normally the common on a joystick would be connected to GND. Would it hurt to connect the common on the rotary switch to +5V instead? The reason for this is that I have tested the code simply by sticking a wire between +5V and one of the 3 inputs to simulate the joystick input. I tried between GND and the input but got no success and I could not figure a way to make this work in the code.

Left to do..... I think.

1) Get answers to the above 2 questions.
1) Actually wire in the joystick.
2) Iron out any problems with my code.
3) create a 3,5V supply from a 5V USB supply (chip runs between 1.8 and 3,6 volts).
4) Connect the CW and ACW pulse outputs to my encoder.
5) Play Ikari Warriors!

I will keep everyone posted on this.

Regards
Muzland
MaximRecoil:
You need a special tool to get the cap off an LS-30. You could either try to find an original tool for this or make your own. I made one from a section of coat hanger wire that works fine. There is a thread here by the Oscar Controls guy that has more information about this - http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=13028.0

Unfortunately, it looks like all of his pictures he posted are now dead links.
Kremmit:
From memory, the Arkanoid spinner pinout has ground and +5 on the middle pins, and the signal pins on either end.  I don't remember which of the middle pair was which, but I have hooked mine up backwards for short periods of time with no ill effects.
Kaytrim:
I did some googeling and found this pic with wires. 

black = ground
red = 5v
yellow = signal
green = signal
muzland:
Thanks for the info on the wiring and LS-30 cap.

I will give it a go this weekend.

On the interface side for the Rotary it struck me that I may be overcomplicating things a little.

Do I really need a microcontroller for convert 3 inputs into 2? After all this is the clever bit

Can I not use something like a custom version of JoyToKey (I am using sidewinder hacks by the way in my cab not a keyboard encoder). This would take the 3 inputs and convert to the relevant CW and ACW pulse through some custom code.

Is the source code for JoyToKey available?

The same principles would apply to a keyboard encoder. You would need some code to intercept keystrokes and replace with new simulated keystrokes.

Thoughts anyone?

Regards
Muzland

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