Building a Better Dance Pad
Ramen Junkie So a while ago, I designed and built my own Dance Dance Revolution Dance Pad. I’m not going to go too much into the details behind that, but for a variety of reasons, I’ve actually used it considerably less than I’d hoped. I also found recently that the arrows don’t detect properly anymore since they are connected to the Directional Pad which reads as analogue not digital.
So, I fixed it. While I was fixing it, I finally added the button box I’d been meaning to add.
The button presses of a Playstation Controller are simply the creation of an electrical contact. This can be replicated on any similar button by soldering wires to either side of the PVC board’s pads inside the controller.
Anyway, the first task was to rewire the pad’s “buttons” to the shoulder buttons of the controller board. Simple enough. Now they show up as “buttons” and not analog pulls in the PC.
Step two was to make the box removable from the pad for easy storage. This also allowed me to replace the ball of wire that I’d ended up with when building it the first time.
This mess becomes a network cable and a network jack.
The network cable is the one used for the new connections tot he shoulder buttons.
Next is the box, which I wired to the four face buttons of the controller. It really doesn’t matter if I use the “start” and “select” buttons since in the end, the Playstation shell is tossed out and I simply map the buttons to whatever I want in game (I have yet to see how this will affect it if i use it on the Playstation).
The end result is much cleaner and much more reliable all around. I will probably add some stickers or something to the box to make it look prettier.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.