Are there any arcade quality analog sticks available?

[bobotech]

I have a friend who is almost fully paralyzed but still has limited use of his arm and hand.  He can sort of play some games on his PS3 but its very tiring for him to do so.

I showed him a webpage of some guy who builds arcade sticks that include a arcade quality analog stick and he was very intrigued but the price was out of touch for him.

I can do all the labor and get most of the parts cheap enough, however where can I locate a pair of reasonably priced large analog sticks compatible with ps3/360s?

[BobA]

Only Panels with Analog Sticks

Ultimarc sells a 360 ultrastick that is analog but I have not seen anyone connect it to a console system to make full use of the analog feature.  Andy at Ultimarc may have some into on that if you email him.

[bobotech]

That is who I was talking about.  Amazing stuff but I can't afford something like that.  Plus I want to be able to build something myself.  And what kind of pots are used in the PS3 and 360 pads?  How many ohms?

[SavannahLion]

I believe they are 10k pots as mentioned here: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=95202.0 and elsewhere though that information isn't the easiest to find it seems.

Have you given any consideration to sourcing some old PC joysticks? They were pot based for years, probably still are, I have no idea. shouldn't be a stretch to swap the 5k pots for a different value. It's considerably cheaper than buying true arcade components and there were some pretty high quality stuff over the years.

[bobotech]

Have you given any consideration to sourcing some old PC joysticks? They were pot based for years, probably still are, I have no idea. shouldn't be a stretch to swap the 5k pots for a different value. It's considerably cheaper than buying true arcade components and there were some pretty high quality stuff over the years.

That is where I was thinking of going.  However I don't relish the idea of butchering up a 25 dollar wired controller plus the cost of a couple of PC joysticks from a thrift store and having it not work.  That is why I was wondering if there were any ready made ones.  But if using a PC based stick as a core would work, then I could go that route.  I guess I could do get a couple of cheap thrift pc joysticks and take them apart and see what makes them tick.

[SavannahLion]

It shouldn't be too hard for a basic analog joystick sporting four buttons and two XY axis sticks. According to the pinout diagram there's very nearly a one to one relationship on the pins. If you dig into a stick that sports a larger number of buttons, sticks or resorts to some sort of odd trickery on the game port you'll be on your own. It still shouldn't be too difficult though. A bunch of Half-Life guys use to convert some of the old high end sticks and mouse combos into USB devices. This was way before anyone offered the community any sort of kits to do that.

[bobotech]

I actually have one of those fancy sticks somewhere and even became a member of a forum devoted to modding them.  That was a long time ago, like 5-7 years ago.  I forgot the name of the stick, but it was blue with a big mouse ball and a big fancy stick.  They had instructions and info on installing an optical mouse components in the mouse section and using a usb microcontroler and wiring it up to the stick controls.  i wish I could remember what that stick was called.