With Dual Stikes and Cthulhu, it is designed in such away that instead of using he terminal strip as pictured below, these PCBs feature holes, connectors or screw terminals on the pcb itself. It is like having that separate screw terminal built in.
In essense they are both hooked up simultaneously and electrically look the the same.
Firmware 1.6.1
Because a bug was found, that made a trigger used to switch between working modes not to work, a new firmware version was released.
To save space the older ones were deleted from the server, but are available for interested people on request.
Background information: some PCBs set the neutral position for the triggers on startup - if the trigger button is pressed this obviously gives the PCB the wrong values.
Just curious. Is this firmware for the full sized model only? I have an SMD version.
Yes it is.
@Gummowned:
What about your proposal to merge the firmware lines? If you give me your pin mappings, I could easily integrate that into the code with macros. Then we could serve both user groups with one ZIP file containing HEX-files for both layouts and different firmware update scripts.
Idea for Dual Strike Version 2 (or Remix ;))
Why not free one pin (S2) for other purposes by connecting two of the 4066N switch controls through inverters to S1 (possibly adding two diodes to the others equalise signal times)? So if S1 is low the USB lines are connected to the DS, if S0 is high the lines are routed to the pass-through pins. It wouldn’t make a difference in behaviour except we were not able to disconnect the USB lines for both, but that is not needed anyway, is it?
Genious and really simple idea. Needs additional parts, but worth a check!!
hmm, we set one pin free, but the price is high. Either we use a 7404 or similar with 14 pin or build up a inverter with transistors and resistors. Costs place and the additional parts…
Mmh, I suppose there are no double inverter chips (6pins?) - couldn’t find any?
But to give a use case: we could use the pin for a status LED that could flash in bootloader mode and/or configuration mode and shine constantly on normal operation.
Another wish I had when working with the board was a screw connector for the pass-through D+ and D- pins, they are only accessible by the piggyback connector, but I could just have screwed the old USB-lines to DS with additional connectors.
And as I will mod my DS to use the S1 and S2 pins to drive status LEDs, screw connectors for them would be handy too.
So 4 more screw connectors would make the board bigger anyways with advantages, so there might enough room for the inverter circuits…
…sorry for thinking so much 
one inverter costs two transistors and two resistors…
And yes, this additional terminals are always good. Dual Strike is just the hardware providing more terminals leed to more compability to other fw like mala support ;). To conclude, Dual Strike has the ability to support to other firmware of course. Adding just some more terminals would even increase the practicability. Hmmm, Mala Strike
??? What’s mala?
Mala is a fronted for MAME and it`s often used in Cabs. MAME Cabs needs a special interface for connecting joystick, buttons and such to the PC. Dual Strike can be configured to be used in mame cabs. But there is a firmware out there especially for MAME Cabs control panels. You can connect default configured MAME with spinner, trackball and all this stuff directly to this project.
And the best is, that only minor changes in the MALA V-USB FW are needed to make it compatible to Dual Strike HW. So Dual Strike is a good choice for people building MAME Cabs, too.
Status LED Mod
Today I soldered two LEDs to my Dual Strike, now depending on the working mode one of these shines. It will become better soon, when my new artwork arrives, but I wanted to have the electronic stuff done. Because seemingly the USB cable is broken (it worked before) first the TE-PCB didn’t work anymore - it was hard and took some time to find out what was wrong. After shortening the cable two times I used my Dremel and now the Dual Strike’s USB connector is accesible through the cable box :bgrin:
Here are the images about it:
http://pohl-michael.gmxhome.de/images/small-pcb_leds_back.jpg
http://pohl-michael.gmxhome.de/images/pcb_leds_front.jpg
http://pohl-michael.gmxhome.de/images/small-stick_interior_led-mod.jpg
very nice!
Wow, that’s pretty snazzy dude. I like that a lot!
Excellent!!
Thank you, guys, but it’s just provisional :china:
I want to build a reflector so the light is more guided and bounded, and I have a full plexi without turbo hole from bencao74 lying around, just waiting for my artwork to arrive…
SVN, Firmware Links and Firmware Version 1.6.2
dash of the german Hardedge forum provided us with a Subversion repository, thank you :china:
It is available under the following links:[list]
[]SVN
[]Web-Interface
[/list]From now on the current versions of the Dual Strike Firmware pakets are always available under the following links:[list]
[]Firmware Update
[]Source Code
[/list]There is a new firmware version, but noone who’s installed version 1.6.1 has to use it!
The only changes are:[list]
[]Firmware update and source code are different archives now.
[]The code of the SMD design was meged with the one for the classic design.
Users of the Dual Strike SMD now must use the file “update_firmware_smd.bat” for the firmware update!
[/list]
Very nice. This will keep the project a lot more organized and easier for the users to obtain any new firmware updates regardless of which board version they have.
I also just tested the new firmware on the SMD version and everything works great.
Dual Strike Firmware
In the archives and in SVN the file for the firmware update (“updatefw.exe”) was missing, this is corrected now.
added new fw in first post