I’ve also got an old sidewinder controller I could use, but does anyone know how the PS3 treats usb gamepads that have less than 12 buttons? Like, how would I configure start and select if the pad only has 9 buttons total?
Yeah, I padhacked one of these last summer for my PS3. It was pretty easy. I traced all the connections back to solder points, and then soldered my wire to the existing solder already on the board. Easyyyyy.
I had another controller when I needed to access home.
And I think it’s common ground, I don’t have my joystick with me now, but it was daisy chained. But I think the directions used a different ground than the buttons.
take your multimeter(and set it to “continuity” mode), put one end on a ground pad put the other one on another ground pad, if it beeps, then it’s common ground.
alternatively, just look closely at the circuit board to check if all the ground traces converge.
My first and only padhacking success was with one of those… they are pretty easy to figure out and the solder points are relatively big and well spaced. The controller directional pad is crap so if you have one of those lying around it is a worthy sacrifice…
What? It works straight on a PS3 as USB only? Wow, talk about a free upgrade!
I don’t work with PS3s often, but I was interested in making a PS3 stick. Is that a problem that it doesn’t have a Home Button and is there a “fix” to that?
The only ‘fix’ is just have an official PS3 pad plugged in to access Home. And yeah, I dunno if the Dual Action works on the PS3 Slim, but it works on the fat ones for sure.
Does anybody mind helping me with this hack?
Here are the pictures:
I might be doing this wrong, but it appears that only three buttons at a time share a ground. That is, Left, Right, and Down share one ground. I believe L1, L2, and Up share a ground, and also the bottom three buttons on the right share another ground and then the top button + R1 and R2 share another ground. Does anybody know if this is the case? If not, I must be testing this wrong. I don’t have a multimeter, so I’m just finding a ground and testing the other signals.
It looks like your controller has an LED in the middle - that means it’s a different model from mine. Notice the picture I posted - mine has no LED.
Yours seems to be a slightly different model, but it should still work out fine.
Daisy chain the things that share a ground. So if a bunch of buttons share a ground, simply wire one prong of each button to the corresponding spot on the PCB. Then run a wire through the second prongs of all those buttons and solder it to their shared ground point on the PCB.
It might take a bit more work, but it should work. A mutli-meter may be your friend though. If you don’t have one, try getting one cheap on ebay.
My main problem is that my stick is the TvC stick (I think it’s a JLF clone) and it has 5 prongs (4 signals + 1 common ground). I just need to know if it’s common ground. Otherwise, it makes my life a LOT harder.
I don’t think it’s going to be much harder. The JLF and JLF clones have five prongs that connect the stick PCB to the main PCB.
If you want, just remove the stick PCB and put 4 microswitches there instead. Then wire the microswitches to the main PCB directly. That way you can solder the grounds on three of the directions together and have the fourth switch have its own ground. If something goes wrong later, you can always put back the JLF clone’s original PCB and microswitches.
You’ll end up with a set-up similar to Hori stock joysticks, which have no stick PCB and just have four microswitches by themselves.
Similarly, you can just scrape some contacts on your JLF clone PCB and make it non-common ground. Then you can wire it the way I described it above. There’s a tutorial somewhere on SRK.
That’s unfortunate. I was hoping that my pad was common ground. I guess I’ll basically bypass the “common-groundedness” of my stick. Thanks for the help.