Project diva homemade controllers

https://www.kitronyx.com/snowpad.html

I'm staring at this so hard, it makes me want to by half dozen of them and stick them on the back of my controller :p (After I saw what Sega did, this idea is not that insane for me anymore) (plus, you got a (half) Chunithm controller for free :p)

 

Hello @finonymouse, nice to see you here ! The pictures of your controller were a big inspiration to build mine.

The microleaf switch seems to be interesting and plug and play (except for the bending).
I will try it before spending much more on a full sanwa set.

 

As a nice to have, I got the wing lights to do cool stuff.



@Doctopus , yeah the speed mechanism is there, interesting. Not that there is a lot I can do to change my setup to support it. As is, I played Dear Cocoa girls at Ex Ex and passed it. I suck at high difficulty but every slide miss was due to me being a derp, not due to the code, so that makes me feel confident. I did try other hard songs and found I couldn't keep up. I may accept the fact my method isn't good enough for top tier Ex Ex difficulties. But as I'm not the ultimate player I can't say that for sure. Changing what I have would be destructive; if I were to physically take out the current one, it would be impossible to put the exact same one back down, and I'd have to recalibrate all over again.

I built this thing to a) see if it was possible b) make it so I can play at home on a real controller c) make my convention setups much easier. Most players who want to play hardcore will just use the DS4 controller, and all they have to do is press the PS buton on their controller to make it work with this one. A vast majority of con attendees will play it as is and have no trouble.


Very interesting on those Snowpads, where were those 2 years ago when I first messed with this? If you could daisy chain them, this is the ultimate solution for sure. Tempted to nab one and see what I can do with it. Good find!

EDIT: Finally got the pics of the optical switch for your folks, sorry it took so long.





From what I can tell, there is a very light spring tension on that tab, and that enters the device for the photo detection. Otherwise its molded like a standard light holder and everything.

 

So that was all the magic. (jk) No wonder why they put a life expectancy on those switches. (Otherwise they are not mechanically tied to the buttons and are basically immune to aging by pressing)

I had the idea of using multiple touchpad controllers when I was still trying to figure out what kind of technologies should I use for the controller so that they are more cost-effective and fits my play style (e.g. Brook vs GIMX vs custom USB microcontroller based encoder, FTIR vs normal camera vs resistive vs capacitive (and this also splits into subtopics e.g. single/multiple controllers, noise immunity, glove safety, what component should I choose, etc.) for the slider, etc.) but soon I abandoned it because

1. 99% of these touchpad/screen controllers are only available under NDA, espeacially for the "good" ones that can support larger surface area, has better performance and are glove safe. It is also basically impossible to get modules for them (you can't even design your own unless you are big companies like Sega) (MTCH6301, however, is an exception. I knew this back then but decided not to touch it because 2)
2. Use multiple controllers to separate zones still sounds crazy for me at that time and is considered as a low priority backup plan (Although now it seems that Sega also did this, in a crazier way)

PS: I still want to see what exactly did they do on the internal of the slider hardware, just for the lol's (it must be really fantastic if they really put 32 independent DS4-sized touchpads on that slider)

 

Thank you for the picture, I see the switch now so it all makes more sense to me now. As long as I can figure out the wiring (Which I'm somewhat confident I can) they should just drop into the buttons and work.

I hope the case for the switch is molded higher against the button case so there isn't that 'gap' of space between the phyiscal button plunger like the ones we've been using. I did also order those leaf spring switches from a few posts ago so that's my plan B if something goes utterly wrong. They were cheap enough to get a set to use as spares or replacement parts even, so I figured I'd hang onto a set of those too.

My LHSXF's are on their way to me now. Before Friday I hope to have them.

 

I got the LHSXF to work and it definitely is the same responsiveness as the arcade. Buttons themselves don't feel exactly right resistance wise but I suspect that has to do with them being worn in from being played by hundreds of people over time at the arcade. Not a big deal, the bottle neck was the break point of the analog switches from before for me.

I can do tickles, swats and double hand drum on a single button now (not that I'm going at these techniques but they're now possible) and in general I just notice that I can play the same way I do at the arcade, like using my pinky to tap buttons during holds without worrying about not tripping the switch and hitting notes so I don't have to hammer my pinky down hard anymore, now it just works so the bottle neck has once again become my own skill. But that's the fun in it.

Below is the diagram of how they're wired up and a picture of them all together in my proto-controller. I gotta finish the real case but it may be a week or two before I get it done since I have a bunch of other stuff going on atm.

 

@colonelmasako I think I ID'd the connector on the optoswitch, it is JST PA series (specifically, S05B-PASK-2. Almost everything (place of notches, locking, size, wire gauge, etc.) matched perfectetly)

Digikey link: https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/jst-sales-america-inc/S05B-PASK-2-LF-SN/455-1850-ND/926756

Housings should be easy to find on the related product section

EDIT: Derp, it's written on the official catalog (I should check it before I start the massive digikey search /facepalm)

EDIT2: Too bad they used pictures instead of text as their catalog pages, no wonder I couldn't find it using Google

 

Switches are holding up, still playing and working on getting better. I moved the analog sticks above the buttons to try and drum on the buttons better for fast songs like Common World Domination but now I'm hopeless with some slide sections as I've lost all the muscle memory.

Haven't had time to make the final plexiglass case but I did have some custom artwork done up for the buttons and printed onto vinyl and wanted to share.

 

How hard would it be to install those switches on the OBSA-100UMQ? I have my own controller but I'm using the regular analogue sanwa switches. Do you need a special/specific housing for them?

 

No modifications to the button are necessary. The pictures in that album are of the switches installed on an OBSA-100UMQ. They just look really odd installed in the pictures because the switches sit at an angle but they do just click in like the other microswitches.

 

hi! i just read this whole form and am remaking the whole arcade machine! this was a really great help

 

After a few days of "field testing" on the finished controller, I just want to say that the SoftPot feels even more narrower than I expected. Movements need to be a lot more precise than on the actual arcade. I keep missing doubles because I cannot move my left hand as precise as my right hand and only one side got registered by the game (espeacially for both-right slides, more than half of the time my left hand fell off the track and I got a wrong/miss unless I properly align my hands then slide)

Otherwise the detection works almost perfectly. I can do doubles (if my hands were properly aligned), stepping (press and hold the touchpad and move a little when the game tells you to slide), hold buttons while sliding, etc. (basically all the tricks I did or saw others doing on the real arcade slider)

So TL;DR: If there is a wider membrane potentiometer it can certainly make things better, but I still want a proper arcade-like capacitive solution if possible.

 

Just saw @Tomtortoise ' latest work on the capacitive slider. Very impressive. I kinda want to see how it runs on my Playstation Labo custom encoder PCB as a stretched touchpad :D
https://tt3d.xyz/2018/07/28/divaslide-revisited-its-happening/
https://tt3d.xyz/2018/08/01/divaslide1_0-code-complete/


PS: I'm planning something big for the slider, although don't expect it will yield any working prototype in a year or more (unless miracle happens or I have a huge amount of time to spend or I decided not being lazy or whatever) so just ignore this line and pretend I said nothing ;)

 

"That controller" made by pol8139 that was featured on Comiket 94, which has a Cypress PSoC based capacitive slider, optoswitches on Chinese buttons (yes!) and uses GIMX as communication method to the PS4.



Author's webpage: http://pol.dip.jp/diva/

Brief video about the process of making: http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm32448697

The full tutorial is available as downloads and printed books, with a little fee. (700 JPY for PDF download and 1080 JPY for book and download)

Code for the slider and the main Arduino-based encoder are also available on author's GitHub, which can be found on their website, for anyone who are interested in them.

PS: If anyone, for some reason, wants to access the references page (http://pol.dip.jp/diva/links/) without the tutorial (although nothing is there besides references, and most of them are easy to find if you do Googling hard enough), here is a hint: The real spring constant of the Sanwa 200G spring (I was right on this one, it's not what Sanwa described) in Newtons per millimeter, round to nearest hunderds. Don't forget the unit.

 

How do you make a controller for the PSP games?

 

Is there another way? First of all, I don't wanna open my PSP (its my only one and its really fragile already). Second, I don't have a PS3 nor Dreamy Theater. (im not mad ok?)

 

So recently I got extremely lucky and stumbled upon a FT arcade in input test mode. After some poking and fitting what I saw with what everybody said about the slider, I want to make it clear that:

1. It has 32 electrodes instead of touchpads in either self capacitance or mutual capacitance sensing mode (consider about what everybody says i.e. only one electrode instead of two or more for one sensor, it is likely self, though I didn't see the pattern myself so it is again a guess), which somewhat explains the super high sensitivity of the slider since with touchpads it is hard to get both positioning precision (will talk more about positioning later) and sensitivity high since it involves changing the size of electrodes, which will "screw up" one when improving another.

2. The number in the input test means signal strength instead of horizontal coordinates. That means the game doesn't read coordinates directly from the sensor, although it is possible to calculate the coordinates afterwards using signal strength and on/off states of individual electrode.

3. The number is 8-bit (0-255) instead of 10-bit (0-1023) as @colonelmasako claimed. I can make the number go as high as ~230 but never beyound 255 when I create an optimal condition for the sensor (that is, cover a region on top of one electrode as much as possible, without wearing gloves). Besides that the number display is 3 digits instead of 4 so I doubt that it will display up to 1023.

4. (bonus) The blob detection does not merge two close but not connected blobs so even if you do a ...01010... pattern it is registered as double. So I learned a new trick of doing <-<- and ->-> doubles by using 2 fingers spread as wide as 1-2 electrodes and slide both fingers on the slider (and gave it a funny name: peace-sign swiping). It is also possible to do a one hand pinch when you are doing -><- or <-->.

5. (another bonus) The DS4 tocuhpad is not a one-to-one replica of the original slider. The sliding increments way too slow compared to the real thing. So I would probably still use the analog stick at some point to "boost" the sliding speed by somehow "pulsing" the value of analog stick while still reporting the touchpad position for the empty sliding sound effect :P

I also got some Omron D2MVs from Marutsu Akihabara main store for extremely cheap price of 216 JPY/pc (tax included) for >=1 pc so if you live in or planning to visit Tokyo then go check them out :) (ftw D2MVs are microswitches by Omron that has actuation force as low as 10gf, and like the optoswitches that official controller used, they also feel linear when pressed and waaaaaaay cheaper than the opto)
For those who have no plan visiting Japan and want these switches, Sanwa also sells them at their Rakuten shop for 270 JPY (tax excluded) each.

 

(The interesting part is on the last half of this post.)

So a while back I did some extra experiments on the DS4 touchpad behavior and found something informative:

1. Swiping over the touchpad with one finger from one end to other consistently fills 20 parallelograms on a chain slide note. Compare to this, the longest single swipe I saw on the arcade slider fills about 37

(As seen here)



2. Sliding with two fingers synchronously fills double the parallelograms.

3. To my surprise, the touchpad does not seem to care enough about the difference between <--> notes and -><- notes. I did a test by forging the coordinates of the touch for the touchpad using my controller board and a <--> slide got registered as <--> AND -><-. Sliding manually instead programmatically results in unpredictable behavior when intentionally sliding backwards. (hisokeee was right, the touchpad is truly awful)

4. The touchpad does do two point tracking so if one swipe the touchpad with two fingers the swipe will be registered as a double slide.

So it seems that using touchpad as a slider or automatically switching between analog sticks and touchpad is actually a bad idea if the controller cannot predict whether a note is a chain slide or a normal slide, since one cannot naively assume the note type just from the user input (What if the user swipes a slide note a bit longer? Is it a slide or a chain slide? What about double swiping a chain slide? How to encode double swiping to touchpad inputs? The list goes on and on...).

It is already obvious that using LR to play slide notes is suboptimal since the swiping directions are not checked (like described on Point 3 above) and there's no way to precisely tell the game about swiping speed and distance thus the feedback on chain slide notes is far away from what an arcade slider actually does. Analog sticks have swiping directions checked but still does not have the correct feedback. Touchpad has the correct feedback but (shockingly) no stable swiping direction check, and encoding doubles could be painful. Seems that everything I could think of are bad ideas on their own if the controller cannot predict whether a note is a chain slide or a normal slide...

And here is where things get interesting.

There is a "forgotten" feature in Customize->Game/Control Config, so forgotten that probably nobody ever thought and touched it. "Controller Vibration", which basically utilizes the controller rumble feature to send a feedback to the player when a chain slide note is in progress.

This is EXACTLY what I want!

If the game tells the controller that it should vibrate, that means the current note is a chain slide note and the controller should map the current finger position to the touchpad as two synchronized points. Otherwise it is a normal slide/an empty slide and the controller maps the swiping directions to analog sticks. This way both swiping directions and swiping distance are checked by the game when needed thus gives the correct response on both chain slide notes and single/double slide notes. PROBLEM SOLVED!

Whoever in SEGA that came up with the idea that "we should use controller vibration to give players feedback ONLY on chain slide notes", I am falling in love with them (metaphorically).

So then I spent a few hours to figure out what makes the PS4 treat third-party controllers with different hardware configurations differently, and I did eventually find out how to make PS4 send rumble signals to my controller. After another few hours of modifying the firmware, I finally have a slider that "feels arcade" when I swipe on it.

There is, however, a major limitation on this approach: it depends on a feature, i.e. rumble, that are not widely supported on off-the-shelf fightstick hardware. In fact I did not see any fightstick boards that support it, yet. (AFAIK Akishop PS360+ and Cerberus have the rumble bit set but they do not enable the output report thus get no feedback at all. That was SOOO close!) Currently my controller and some commercially available converters support parsing the rumble report, and GIMX will support it eventually as well since I notified the developers about my discovery on how to enable rumble on licensed USB controllers. It is also possible to implement it via an EXTREME padhack that involves emulating touches on the touchpad (whether using digital or analog methods) and detecting voltages on the rumble motor driver outputs. Still, this is a bad news for all fightstick board users, which also covers the majority of FT controller users/makers.

(Actually there is another annoying flaw: no more empty sliding chime! D: But again nevertheless this is the best way to replicate a slider that I could think of now.)

(Anyway: phase one of Project Make-Slider-Arcade-Again done, move on to the next phase)

EDIT: use official terms like "chain slide notes" instead of inventing my own