| Here are some of photos of joysticks that I've made in the past: |
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| The top four sticks were all made with Playstation pads.
The bottom stick is made using the MadCatz Dreampad, and was the first I made with a "real" enclosure. It was based off the plans
from LuSiD's Arcade Flashback, and measured 48" x 18". The very first joystick
I made was enclosed in a Speaker box, A la Matt Staroscik. Unfortunately I dismantled it before
getting snapshots. God it was awful. The stick in the middle features custom artwork
and plexiglass. Here are some shots of the wiring
inside of the white 2-player stick: |
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| The wiring
is a real rat's nest, as you can see. I've developed much better techniques
since then. You can see that the microswitches are just facing all sorts
of directions. In newer versions I have them all facing towards each other
to make daisy-chaining the ground easier. I've also learned better ways of soldering.
In the picture above on the right, you can see
two small black screws holding the pad to a separate piece of wood which is
screwed to the underside of the Control Panel. This prevents the pad
from sliding around during use. |
| Here's how my wiring looks these days. A lot cleaner, and definitely looks
more professional. Notice how the wires are coming from the bottom of the pad. That's
due to the small holes I drilled in the PCB. This holds the solder much better than
just soldering to the copper. |
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| Here's a close-up of the start buttons. You can see that these two buttons are different
from the rest of the buttons because they are Horizontal Microswitches. The bottom left picture is a
shot of all of the wiring underneath, and the bottom right shows a close up of soldering on a few
of the buttons. Notice how the wires are not soldered to the Circular copper "teeth" but to the
small holes with copper around them. The guage of wire I used was too big or I would have been
able to insert the wires through the holes and solder them.
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| Here are some projects sent to me by
readers of the site. |
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