The official Cthulhu and ChImp thread - Try our new Dreamcast flavor!

Tech Talk
1661

Ohhhh, ok, I’ll try this tonight, but I think I might have an idea of what might be wrong.

I don’t have it in front of me to look at, but there might be some solder bridging a connection on one of those columns.

When I found out it was an MC I was going to put a PS2 cord in there, I opened one up and started to solder it, but one of the wires snapped. It was frustrating so I took them out and cleaned it up.

I thought I had gotten everything, but I assumed those columns and spots were only for the other systems, and didn’t have anything to do with the rest of the board.

I’m an idiot, I bet anything when I look at that tonight that I’ll find stray solder somewhere in that area that needs cleaned up.

Btw, those PS2 wires are the most ridiculously small wires I’ve ever had to put in anything. I might have to get another Cthulhu sometime to test on, because that’s tough.

1662

If you set it up so that the Guide button was your dedicated Home button on the Cthulhu, you don’t have to do anything; the lock switch will deactivate it in both 360 and Cthulhu modes.

Heh, yes. Sorry 'bout that, but there’s not much I can do about that :slight_smile: They’re a bitch, especially if you use a cord from a legit DualShock or DS2; where its like 2 uber thin copper wires each and a ton of cotton fluff. Those are the worst. Third party extension cords are better about giving you some actual metal to work with.

1663

Those PS2 cables are NASTY. I’ve soldered them before and I know exactly what you talking about. 1 thing I found out about the PS2 Cable wires is that all the wires have nylon strings besides the stranded copper wire. In order to pre-tin the wires, you need to separate the copper wires from the nylon strands, once you’ve done that, then soldering them wires should be just as easy as any other wires.

When I first tried to solder them damn wires, I kept breaking them like you did because I was having hard time getting the wires to solder properly so ended up over heating the wires, after I remove the GAWDDAMN nylon strings, then it was all good.

1664

Awesome. Was hoping for that to be the case, but wanted to cover that base before I actually went about wiring it.

RE: PS2 cables, I HATE THOSE THINGS WITH A VENGEANCE. Want some real fun, just try wiring a PS2 cable from a dead Dual Shock controller to a DB15 for use in a UPCB. Make sure all small animals that you might want to kill during this process are out of the room though. I would feel bad if anything died during this.

I’ll make a note to grab an extension cable for my cable to my Cthulhu.

1665

I will have to get an extension then. I am using a dual shock. My soldering skill isn’t up to par for something this small, lol.

I suppose it might be easy to solder the strands to a bigger gauge wire and then put them in the board.

1666

Hi Toodles,

Do you still use your toodlesdc@hotmail.com email address? If you no longer use it can you give me your current email address so I can get in contact with you?

Thanks

1667

marcus@marcuspost.com
That hotmail account only existed for MSN.

1668

Woohoo! All working now. Thanks Toodles. You rock.

Can’t wait to see what you come up with next.

1669

Just a quick question to anyone who can answer this. Correct me if I’m wrong, but if I’m doing a dual PCB mod (PS3 Cthulhu & wired 360 PCB), as long as my buttons on the joy stick are daisy chained, then would it be necessary to still have a single common ground 360 PCB?

I don’t know it makes a difference, but I also plan to use a DPDT switch and a terminal strip.

1670

Sorry for cluttering up the thread with a mostly unrelated question but apparently he can’t receive PMs yet.

Where did you get those little mounting posts for your PCB? And what are they called? My PCBs are currently rattling loose in my case :frowning:

1671

Thanks Toodles :slight_smile:

1672

?? But if you daisy chain them, then they will be common, and if the board wasn’t made to have half of everything connected, it’ll go tits up.

Listen, and trust me on this. The boards must be common ground. Any attempt at an exception will most likely fail, and will always be more expensive and more difficult than just buying a common ground board.

1673

To everyone that had problems getting the PSX support working, could you detail what you did wrong? I’ve checked everything and I still can’t get PSX support working on my Innovation DC converter (Cube and PS3 support work perfectly).

1674

Hey Toodles, Ive run into a road block and am gettin a little frustrated, thought Id bounce it off you and see if you have ne suggestions.

Right now I have what appears to be a raw pointer to the device and can open up a RAW read/write data stream.

But it appears that I am limited to HID input and output reports(at least so far).
I get the HID report Capabilities from Cthulhu as:

Size(Bytes) Capability
9 public ushort FeatureReportByteLength;
20 public ushort InputReportByteLength;
0 public ushort NumberFeatureButtonCaps;
1 public ushort NumberFeatureDataIndices;
1 public ushort NumberFeatureValueCaps;
1 public ushort NumberInputButtonCaps;
30 public ushort NumberInputDataIndices;
17 public ushort NumberInputValueCaps;
1 public ushort NumberLinkCollectionNodes;
0 public ushort NumberOutputButtonCaps;
0 public ushort NumberOutputDataIndices;
0 public ushort NumberOutputValueCaps;
0 public ushort OutputReportByteLength;
[MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.ByValArray, SizeConst = 17)]
public ushort[] Reserved; (17 0’s)
5 public ushort Usage;
1 public ushort UsagePage;

Cthulhu reports 0 for OutputReportByteLength but Im not even sure if that matters any.
Im stuck, I have what appears to be an unrestriced raw data stream to the cthulhu, but Im limited to a 20 byte buffer (InputReportByteLength ??), continued reading past 20 bytes just repeats this 20 bytes which result in:

0,0,0,8,128,128,128,128,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0

and which changes depending on what buttons Im pressing.
It would seem that because Im currently using the HID drive when plaugged into my PC that Im limited to HID based read/writes and that I cannot send a raw control msg whise using this driver. If this is the case, the PC side gets WAY more complicated as it would require users to install another driver(which is messy and something I was trying to avoid at all costs) in order to communicate at a lower level.

Or I could be talking out my arse and have no clue whats going on, if u got any suggestions Im all ears cuz Im pounding my head againt the wall right now.

1675

Sorry if this has been answered elsewhere, but I wasn’t able to find the info. Where do you get the wires to connect the stick and each button to the Cthulu board?

1676

You need the ability to send setup packets, which is a little lower in the protocol. Give me an idea what functions from what library you’re using and I’ll see if I can find a setup packet function in the lib.

1677

I have ordered the Cthulhu. Being a total n00b, I decided to read up on how to put my stick together ahead of time just to get familiar with it. I started with the welcome document and there’s one thing I don’t quite understand…

Does that mean each button and directions has 2 wires? One going to the appropriate spot on the board and one to the ground?

1678

I think this diagram will help you…

1679

Thanks!

Now, I know the PCB is solderless…but how do the wires stick to the buttons? I’m assuming that needs to be soldered?

1680

You need these…

For more info on how to do it… go to this link… http://www.slagcoin.com/joystick/pcb_wiring.html