Ok I am in the middle of building a Sequential shifter, and was going to use a gamepad for the hotkeys. I have found that the traces on the gamepad PCB are just so brittle that I cant solder anything to them with out it braking the trace right off of the board.

I was looking at this http://www.leobodnar.com/products/BU0836/ and thought that it might be worth it just to put out the money for it? Also am I right to say that you can run pots right off of this unit? Could I use this also to contol a set of pedals if I were to build them too?

I am wanting to build pedals, switch board and shifter for my cockpit in the future! Will this device be able to control all of that?

Any help would be very appreciated!

Thanks

That looks adequate. You can have up to 8 analog inputs (pots) and up to 32 digital inputs (buttons). You should be able to build a whole wheel with shifter and pedals off of that thing.

Cobra..... I am somewhat new at this. I didnt realize that pots were the Analog input and switches or buttons were the Digital inputs. Could you explain to me how I would get 32 digital outputs from this unit!

I can try to explain it!

Ok so if you follow the schematic given on that site (copied here for convenience):



You've basically got 12 pins to work with. If you short any 2 of those pins, a button press is registered by the controller, and something will happen on the screen (in that control panel I guess). Now, it's pretty much impossible to physically fit 36 switches within that 12-pin space, so you will need a breadboard of some sort to spread them all out. Basically you need to make it so that you can link each pin on each row with each pin on each column. I don't know how much knowledge you have of electronics (and reading schematics) but each "connection" is symbolized as a dot on the line. So the only connections are made through the switches, the rows and columns do not actually connect, they are simply overlapping. Finally, the diodes are there to make sure that current only flows from the columns to the rows, so that if two buttons in the same column are pressed for example, then the two columns aren't shorted out and all the current goes into the row. I assume the "rows" are actually ADC inputs or something, because somehow the controller will know which button was pressed, but you don't have to worry about that. All you have to do is wire everything as shown and it should work. I hope that makes sense, if you have more questions, just ask!

Ok awesome I followed along there with yea... You explained it very well.

I went to college for electronic engineering Well i attended lol. Oh if i could have those days back. Thanks very much for your help. I am gonna order that and get to work!

Thanks again Cobra

That's cool, I'm currently in university for computer engineering, so I've actually been working with this kind of stuff a lot lately, as my last year is wrapping up. Less than a month left of school then I'm out for good!

Cool, i bet that is nice feeling!

Im gonna try and get some work done on this shifter while i wait for the controller to get here! Hopefully i;ll get some pics and post them..... cant wait!

Thanks again for your help