Everyone who has a fancy custom arcade stick here always has immaculate cable management. But I can’t seem to find youtube videos which really go indepths on how to do it for an arcade stick. Anyone else have any good resources to find out how to do top notch cable management so I don’t end up with a bunch of loose wires?
I don’t know of any real “resources”. I’m pretty sure everyone who does clean wiring just kind of picked it up.
And I don’t you need a youtube video specific to arcade sticks. Why not just look up cable management in general, and extrapolate the skills?
The bottom line is plan your wire routes ahead of time, measure multiple times before cutting, and practice and practice.
I’ve looked the wiring from my own custom arcade sticks from 2007 (rat’s nest), 2011 (which I thought was neat at the time, but looking back today it was still messy), and 2016 (much more satisfied with the results).
A starting point…
http://www.slagcoin.com/joystick/pcb_wiring.html
Honestly, many of us learn “monkey see, monkey do” style. At least that’s how I learned. Searching “fightstick wiring,” “arcade stick wiring,” “fightstick wire management,” and “arcade stick wire management” in Google Images is an invaluable resource. I must have scoured through (and saved for later reference) thousands of images before I started my own projects.
It’s actually pretty simple.
1: Cut techflex to length
2: start W/ 1p and feed through sleeve
3:heatshrink over end of sleeve and 1p wires
4: push sleeving inward above each other button causing a small gap in weave allowing you to slip in a wire
5: pull end of sleeving back to 4p button revealing all wires
6: cut grounds an inch or 2 after 4p
7: solder all ground wires together, using one of the cut offs to extend single wire to ocb
8: heatshrink over ground wire solder joint
9: heatshrink over end of sleeve
10: install wires into pcb
Quoted for Truth and such.
Also "Why not just look up cable management in general, and extrapolate the skills?"
I like to push this concept more int he DIY crowd.
Want to do X for Y controller, Look up the sources related to X regardless of what Y is and apply those skills.
Truth is we never, ever have youtube specific step by step wiring examples for every stick, board and console, and for every combination of such.
Problem with a “paint-by-the-numbers” system for wiring sticks is you never teach anyone anything but be dependent on a single series of videos.
And once that video series gets pulled from You Tube or gets out of date, those people are shit out of luck.
What will serve the individual moders and the community much more is to teach the base skills and extrapolate or apply those skills to other things.
All the suggestions have been very helpful. Thank you :).
Techflex, heatshrink, zip ties, even hot glue or super glue can really help you clean up your wiring. There’s no wrong answer for doing it, even electrical tape is not the worst of things, just not the best.
Hell, I’ve cleaned up wiring by tying rubber bands up inside of a stick because I simply didn’t have any other resources on hand. It worked, but again, not the best solution.
A simple and cheap tactic I use is wiring everything tidy with “twisties” as in the ones we use in a loaf of bread or our own console controllers to wrap the cables with. I do this before committing to zip ties as to having the flexibility to change things up if need be until you’re satisfied with the layout, once done, replace the twisties for zip-ties and you’re done! This also applies to tech flex and everything in between, mind as well have your wire all sized to a tee before dressing it up.
I’m also a big fan of zip-tie feet, or whatever those self-adhesive squares are called, they can help keep the wiring in place and you can use either zip ties or Velcro ties if the application isn’t meant for a stationary cable loom.
The best piece of advice I can provide is look at all the pics of stick wiring, from the real nice ones to the real hectic ones, look at them all for a while, do some image searching for stick mod wiring and you’ll see that after a while of browsing around, you’ll begin to understand the differences between styles and what works best for you. Wiring is very basic, it’s all just common sense.
I used twist ties in my recently completed first build and they work fine. I plan on improving my case build and reinstalling the guts in the new build so I didn’t want anything permanent. They work so well I’ll just stick with the twist ties. I’d use something better if I was assembling for somebody else and I wanted more professional looking.
The above steps make the below harnesses:
Which in turn makes this:
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1/4 & 3/8
@butteroj was the 1/4 inch used on the USB cable and 3/8 on buttons?
And how did you cut the techflex without having it fray?
Correct. I just cut it with scissors. Nothing special. Any fraying that does happen gets covered by the heat shrink.
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I used your technique this weekend, thank you for posting this! Very helpful, wire management looks cleaner, I also applied this to some LED wiring. The soldering of the ground wires together really helped.
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I’m unsure if this would be better served in a new thread, but I’m thinking of making a custom PCB to help out with cable management. Has anyone here got any experience with that sort of stuff?