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