Project diva homemade controllers

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Finally, someone in adafruit thought "Umm MPR121 is obsolete now.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?

 

Good because that's what happened.

It's this cable... (amazon item B0753HBT12)


And this will go inside the controller to make the wiring easy and allow for it to be disconnected...
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/262896398938

Does anyone know the pin-out for the serial? the cable on the slider has 3 pins, red, white and black