Windows control panel then gives me 6 analogues and 14 digital outputs:
which isn’t bad for £2! (especially as most usb gamepads only give you 4 analogue outputs)
Even better is that each xbox gamepad has a built in 2 port usb hub. This means that I can easily solder the 2nd gamepad I bought directly to the first gamepads circuit board. This will give me 12 analogues and 28 digital outputs for less than a fiver… not bad I think you’ll agree!
Does the controller have a good PCB for soldering on to or is it those little push pads that I hate so much? Good bargain though, even if you just end up using it to play Fifa 10.
the answer is yes and no, the solder pads are nicely spaced out for the analogue nubs but some of the digital pads might be trickier to solder… have a look:
The pads aren’t too bad to solder to, just use a sharp blade to scrape off the carbon contact to reveal SHINY!!! copper track, the track must be shiny otherwise it still has crap on it, the way I did it was to scrape off the track just as it turns into the pad and then lay your wire ontop of the revealed track, that way you get a good solid contact area.
Just mocked up a quick test using the supplied driver and one button hooked up to an arcade button and SUCCESS!
Although I would recommend not splicing the cable into the xbox cable. What I did was unsolder the original cable from the PCB and solder in a usb cable back in. Much neater.
good idea - I’ll probably do the same once I’ve soldered everything else on to the circuit board… just need to do some tests with various potentiometers first…
That’s what I used for the Leo Bodnar device, which is the same thing really - a game controller. I think I read somewhere on here that the size of the pot isn’t too important, but the fact that it is linear is. I seem to remember someone saying 10 -100k will work, but 10k is the standard.
Hey, I’m planning on making a custom controller myself, but i haven’t decided about the brain yet. I believe that you don’t have to buy a board but you can just rip one from something like an xbox controller.(this is an awesome post) The only thing is, I want a lot more knobs then 2 controllers offer. Is it possible to link 4 or even 5 or 6 to the first board? I’m really looking forward to start building mine.
I’m not sure how you’d go about connecting them, but what i’d do would be to use a powered USB Hub inside the controller, with all the PCBs running through it, you could even use a hub with more inputs and have some spare.
Windows would likely support up to 4 xbox controllers at the same time (haven’t checked but it could be more). A usb hub wouldn’t be necessary since each xbox gamepad has a built in 2 port usb hub so they could all be daisychained off each other inside the midi controller case.
I understand but will the chaining increase the latency of it all or is there no noticeable difference? And can you make a guess at how much LEDs i can power from the linked brains?
btw im getting really excited about this method. Im goin to buy 4 controllers this weekend and start testing. Awesome post!
unsure about latency - it’s definitely something that would need to be considered whilst testing.
LED’s could be powered directly from the USB power but I think you’re after a midi brain that allows you to control, via midi, when the LED’s get activated, which is something that a USB gamepad (like the xbox pad) doesn’t offer, unfortunately.
i was wondering, i got a ps2 gamepad that has one broken joystick which makes it impossible to use. Could i clip the ps2 connector off and convert into usb and use that as a brain?
