Project diva homemade controllers

Sounds like a question I would ask a year ago. So I guess Soon™?

BTM my answer is "doesn't matter on capacitive touch panel". :P

Hmm SOIC-16, traces under chip :(... I hate to ask but is there any chance that I can know more about the markings on these chips?

Or you just prefer to play it the "hard" way? I mean the "arcade combo" i.e. Sanwa photo-switches+buttons+200g springs feels worse than the arcade to you IIRC. Same with the Zhou controller, but somehow 400g spring gives you a boost. Do you have a "frequently played" machine and does it use 400g springs by reasons like damage control?

 

Confused by this question. Everything I compare the controllers to is compared to an actual Future Tone arcade cabinet at my local arcade. So those are where the comparisons are coming from and it's my standard or control for everything I experience with controllers.

Like, what do you mean by damage control and arcade combo and hard way? I'm not familiar with the terms or what you mean by them at least.

The Sanwa buttons with 200g springs on my old controller were closer to the arcade cabinet than zhou buttons with 200g because the zhou buttons have more throw and travel than sanwa's so 400g in a zhou increase button resistance and improve reset to be more comparable to the arcade cabinet. The 400g springs make the generics feel closer to 200g Sanwa's in their operation if that makes sense. My old controller setup with the Sanwa buttons and LHSXF sensors I still felt wasn't right because there were things I found myself incapable of doing but now I realize I had been handicapping myself because my FT config had a 12+ delay on it which was why things like two-hand-one-button spams were absolutely not working previously. Now I play with 0 lag config which was what I should've been doing from that start.

I think that's the gist of what was being asked. Basically, I think the 200g springs with Sanwa buttons and photo sensors which was the best I could do to mimic arcade was the best replication of the arcade cabinet but because my lag config was wrong I thought something was wrong and drove myself up a wall not realizing what it was. I couldn't understand why I could get difficult songs like Common World Domination on extreme at the arcade with relative ease but on the home arcade why I'd fail at them miserably and it's because the lag config was sabotaging me.

 

I heard that there are some arcade machine operators/manufacturers who like to use harder (i.e. require more force to activate) spring since they believe that it will reduce the damage to the microswitch, etc. if newbies slap the button VERY hard.

The "hard" way of playing means the same thing: get more used to a 400g setup than 200g.

The "arcade combo" is basically a "Sanwa LHSXF+button+200g spring" combo since that's the default setup for an official arcade cabinet.

I see. So my assumption is completely wrong. I thought that you might just simply prefer 400g springs over 200g.

 

https://www.adafruit.com/product/1602

Finally, someone in adafruit thought "Umm MPR121 is obsolete now. Let's make a successor". :P

 

Another weird component:

https://micronor.com/product/mr386/

LHSXF's evil twin. Perfect for "optical for the sake of optical" usage. :)

(BTW MS-O-3 is terrible spec-wise. Why would anyone use it for rhythm game controllers or even any arcade machines when we got D2MVs and LHSXFs?)

(Oh and Cherry Silent Red/Brown is OP. It has everything LHSXF has including durability and "feel", and yet only 1/30 of the cost #RIPSanwa)

 

After I saw how lazy, cheap, and ridiculously overpriced Project Diva controllers from others are (including but not limited to Z*** controller and H*** Project Diva pad). I think it is the time to put this to an end.

That's right, I decided to manufacture and sell my controller, with overall better quality, properly reconstructed arcade feel and yet only fraction of the cost compared to these overpriced competitors. With two years of research into the detailed mechanics of how Future Tone handles player inputs, I have enough confidence that performance-wise my controller would outperform all the competitors existed. This is especially true on the slider part, which all my competitors basically don't even know how to properly make it. Despite that I have the technologies to beat all the competitors, I decided to not jack-up the price. Sure I can sell it for $500+ and make 400% profit out of it just because I have all those exclusives, but I also truly LOVE Future Tone and would like to have more players to play it in its originally intended form. After I saw the Z*** controller I did notice that there are significant amount of players that would like to have a "just work" solution. So I figured that selling my controller with less price/profit and more value in mind would be a good way to introduce players who are interested in PDAFT to try it out.

So here is the list of features that would be included in the controller:

• A slider that is actually accurate and does not cheaply emulate shoulder buttons.
• Micro-switches that has ultra-low actuation force and hysteresis (Omron D2MV-01-1C1). Perfectly suitable for tickling while still keep a reasonable price.
  
• Chinese buttons with original Sanwa 200G springs.
  
• Arduino-based hackable firmware, completely open-source.
  
• Open-source hardware with laser-cuttable and 3D-printable components. Fully self-serviceable.
  
• Built with love. :P

The price will be US$179.99 for a pre-built controller and US$159.99 for a complete kit with assembly manual (trust me, it will be very easy to assemble). Pre-order your controller now at here: https://bit.ly/IqT6zt

April fools :DDDDD

 

I have an official Project Diva AFT control panel. I am wondering if anyone out there has had luck using the official touch slider to interface with pc or ps4.

 

Turns out that I was wrong. There was a bug in the touchpad emulation code that prevents the touch points to be released properly. I fixed it and the touchpad guesture detection became saner. Because of this, I also developed an improved slider emulation technique that basically works as the old one but using touchpad all the time instead of switching to analog stick. This way the empty sliding chime works again (yay!) while other things remain the same as the old technique.

If my speculation is correct, the official slider uses some sort of UART communication (either RS232 or TTL-ish) and the protocol is quite simple. As seen on these tweets:





It should be possible to use an Arduino to read back the values and emulate a DS4 to control the game.

For PCs I'm not sure, but if the slider uses serial port, it could be possible to plug the slider into a USB to serial converter, specify the correct COM port, and tell TLAC to stop redirecting the communication for sliders.

If you want to experiment more on it, feel free to PM me for assistance. We can probably figure this out together :D.

 

I've been lurking this thread for a while now lol. I've decided to make one too. What would be the best way from scratch to make the touch bar? I'm reading all of this and I've gathered (for most accurate experience) :

• Don't map touch pad to L or R
• Don't map touch pad to controler sticks
  
• Don't use brook's adapter

I plan on using a DS4 controller as the base

 

I wouldn't really recommend a padhack setup since you'll need to figure out the touch pad protocol using a logic analyzer (or from other sources like Linux kernel drivers) and it may be different across different DS4 revisions. It's also one of the reason why I rolled out my own Teensy-based controller board. If you have some experience on Arduino programming you can try to reproduce what I did with a Teensy 3.x/LC and the code I published. However note that I'm still working on the next, improved version of my controller and I wouldn't recommend anyone to use my current firmware/hardware design directly. However I did split out the PS4 controller emulation part and it works reasonably well on a Teensy 3.x/LC board. So if you are interested you can start from there.

For slider emulations, since it's simple and straightforward enough, you can also implement them in only a few lines of code after you set up the emulation (or on a separate Arduino if you choose the padhack route).

For the hardware part, it depends on how sophisticate you want your implementation to be. A simple one would be copper tape + off-the-shelf capacitive touch modules like CAP1188 module from Adafruit (or tontouch series if you are on budget). For a more complex one, you can use PSoC, which are programmable microcontrollers like Arduino but with goodies like integrated capacitive sensing functionalities and programmable hardware blocks. This will also give you free neopixel control interface (as in no significant CPU stalls when refreshing the LEDs thanks to the programmable hardware blocks)

PS: Not sure whether or not brook uses the same zet6223 chip in all of their products, but if so, padhacking brook controllers with touchpad and rumble are also an option since zet6223 seems to be relatively simple to emulate and there are plenty of documentations available to get you started

 

I'm not too familar with coding in arduino so I think I l'll go with the simpler route. So that means I should actually pickup the brook adapter and CAP 1188 touch models. Also is there a super large benefit with using much more complex sliders? Most of the songs I tend to play don't really use the sliders (I've actually barely played future tone as the controller mapping never felt right like the other project diva games).

 

SEGA is planning an official FT ASC and they are currently doing a poll on what platform people are mostly interested in (PlayStation, Switch, all, or none). If everything goes well it would be released somewhere in 2020. Price would be somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 yen (excl. tax).

 

In the long run it would be beneficial since it would be closer to what the arcade actually feels like. Also unlike button-based sliders, all capacitive sliders (fancy or not) need some level of Arduino programming in order to get them running.

 

Turns out that I was probably wrong again. Brook PS3PS4 Fighting Board (the small one, not the bigger, PS360 form factor plus version) actually has what look likes to be rumble output on board. This was confirmed by the labeling on the board (M1, M2), the typical motor driver circuits near the M1 and M2 pins and the FAQ on brook website. Since I don't own this board, I didn't verify it in person so I'm not 100% sure that the board is actually driving the motors using these pins. If anyone knows, feel free to tell me by replying below.

 

Hello, new around here. I just got my Future Tone arcade control panel from Japan (I'm in the UK) and have got it running on my PC.

So far just the buttons are working using an original Akishop PS360 board from one of my joysticks.

Next will come working out how to get the touch slider working, I don't even know what voltage it runs on yet 5v, 12v. The LEDs in the buttons are 12v so getting them on shouln't be too hard...

Pictures....



I striped it down to clean as it had a lot of dust inside...




The buttons...


Switches...


Touch Slider stripped down...


The sensors up close...




The connectors, the large on is the buttons, one of the grey ones is the headphone cable, the other is power for the slider (i think)...

 

Copied from some PMs that I sent to the other guy. Hope it helps.

 

I've ordered a serial to USB adapter, a serial to screw terminal adapter and a 4-pin Molex PCI rear bracket for the power.

This way I can power it from my PC's PSU, so the amp and watt requirements of the slider won't matter, plus I can power the button lights from it too.

Anoyingly my motherboard doesn't have a serial header on it so I'll have to use a USB adapter.

I've just tested the button lights on a 12v psu and they all work.
Does anyone know if the touch slider will show any signs of life by just having the power alone connected - a flash of lights, or some sort of self test?

 

That would be ideal.

AFAIK no, you need to control it via the serial port for it to show things.

Just make sure your adapter can do RS232 and you hook it up correctly. It could be quite damaging to hook an RS232 device to TTL/UART.

 

I also recently bought an arcade panel and have been hoping someone would figure out how to get the touch slider working. In searching for a solution, I found this project page http://ryun.halfmoon.jp/touchslider/ It looks to be fully working and it has complete pin out listings and build instructions. It seems they are charging for the "mcs"? I don't know enough about programming or circuit design to necessarily implement any of this but maybe the information provided from this project would be enough for someone to design something?