HELP. GamePad Hacking for control Panel

[noobofthecentury]

Hi
This is my first attempt to try and hack a gamepad
I have done my homework reading about common grounds, soldering.
I thought I know enough, but after opening this thing..
I do not feel confidence that I know what I am doing

This is the PCB inside of a USB Logitech Precision gamepad (10$)




If anyone out there has hacked a gamepad before, plz take a look into these pics and give me some tips.
If you have the time, I would really appreciate if you can pin point one or two locations on the picture for me. Thx You.

I will keep this gamepad progress updated!

[ahofle]

Not to dissuade you from hacking, but another option is a $20+ GPWiz from GGG:

[noobofthecentury]

yea, but im in a tight budget
the pad is from last year and i got solder and soldering iron from my big bro's

[daywane]

see the contact #sw2 ?

notice the bottom part has 2 contact leads. there is a ground. going to sw4

any spot that has 2 contacts is a ground

hard to tell with the pics but seams to me the top part of your contacts is signal and the bottom s are ground

Sidwinders (old style ) (sound card plugins) and PS1 game pads are much more friendly to hack.

There is nothing wrong with game pad hacks been doing them for a long time myself

think about putting the game pad in a box with a male plug from radio shack  ( Mine has 25 pins, I think) then make your CPs 25 pin female.
You can have many differant CP's this way and only have to wire up 1 Game pad.

[gonzo90017]

think about putting the game pad in a box with a male plug from radio shack  ( Mine has 25 pins, I think) then make your CPs 25 pin female.
You can have many differant CP's this way and only have to wire up 1 Game pad.

Some pictures would be nice.

[brandon]

The only problem I could see with doing gamepad hacks is if you use several and you run into problem with windows swapping joy1 and joy2 thus messing up your mame control settings...   other than that go for it.   but ahofle said the GPWIZ is super affordable and it has 32 inputs.. not something you're likely to find on a PC gamepad.  Plus having a common ground and dedicated device IDs is VERY nice.

[SavannahLion]

I have the precisin pad. Not sure if it's the same since I'm at work and I can't see your picture.

I took mine apart just for giggles. It's a piece of work and a real ---smurfette--- to figure out how it works without dumping the microcontroller programming or using an oscilloscope. As near as I can figure, and recall, about the controller. Only about half the buttons have a true ground as referenced by the ground line from the USB. One button has a ground, but it's ground as referenced by  one of the I/O pins. The rest appear to use a collection of tricks. The others take a lot of guessing. One pair seems to share a 2.5V(haven't done the math on it yet) line. Another set seems to be determined by a pair of high speed dual diodes, the diodes probably act as filters for a pulse signal. In other words, it looks like some of the buttons are part of a very small matrix.

Of all the controllers to pick out. You picked out a difficult one. The easiest way to hack this particular controller is the simplest. Each button will get it's own pair of wires with no common ground. For a controller with ten accessable buttons, this translates to 20 wires that needs to be soldered and wired. You can take some shortcuts with the common ground wires, but keep it at the controller, don't bring it out into your control panel.

[noobofthecentury]

Hi, im uploading more pics
thank you for the replies guys

I hope these new pics will help

This is the Whole thing


These are the LEFT SIDE



These are the Middle Part



These are the right side




I really hope some of you can save the image and make a dot examples on where I should solder.
thx guys. I dont mind mistakes.. its a good try

[brock.sampson]

I can do one better.  That is the exact controller I hacked for my 1 player desktop controller.  I have an awesome camera I'm just not that great with it yet.  The problem I ran into was not all buttons share a common ground.  I used as many buttons as I could that share a common ground.  The wing buttons and the sw9 and sw10 share common a ground.  All the other buttons have a dedicated grounds.  See attached pics.  My hot glue job isn't the greatest but it holds everything in place.  I did tear a couple of the traces off before I started using hot glue as you can see on sw2.  Let me know if you have questions.

[noobofthecentury]

thx you, u r god
btw can u post also the picture of the back?

looks like some cable are going to behind it (like the ones on the most to the right) what r those?

[SavannahLion]

Those three wires coming off the right are for the shoulder buttons on that side. That fat black wire is the USB cable.

[Franco B]

think about putting the game pad in a box with a male plug from radio shack  ( Mine has 25 pins, I think) then make your CPs 25 pin female.
You can have many differant CP's this way and only have to wire up 1 Game pad.

Some pictures would be nice.

Project Box



D-sub Connectors

[Stormrider]

I made my hack this weekend:



I also made these diagrams. I hope they help:

http://www.joystickvault.com/showphoto.php/photo/513/limit/recent

http://www.joystickvault.com/showphoto.php/photo/514/limit/recent