Hacking a dance pad, Button ohms too high!

[hack124x768]

Trying to hack a red octance ignition dance pad (that the controller went bad on) to a USB pc gamepad.

The problem is when a button is pressed on the pad it has about 100k ohms of resistance, too much for the gamepad to accept it as a closed circuit.

Any ideas on how to make this work?

[DK]

Add a resistor in parralel with the dancemat. That'll bring down the resistance.

[nitro2k01]

I don't believe for a second that the resistance is that high. Are you sure that...

• you're probing the right points?
• you're putting enough pressure on the pad?
• it doesn't give a short "pulse" of lower resistance upon impact?

[hack124x768]

Yes, I'm probing the right points. I cut off the circuit board right after where the plastic conductor sheets connected to it so I would have a good place to solder, and from the traces there, all buttons have 100k when pressed, and open when not pressed. Possibly not enough pressure, but the only way to fix that would be to get fatter, and that seems a bit counter-intuitive. :p I'm 135lbs, so that should be enough anyway.

Should I just find a resistor right above the point that the gamepad recognizes a button press and solder one of those parallel to each button (with diodes)? Would that be affected by temperature change or moisture at all?

The pad I am using is a microsoft joystick with 8 buttons in a 2x4 matrix. I'm only trying to use 4 of them for now. The dance pad has 10 buttons with a common ground.

(Sorry for taking so long to reply, I'll go turn email notification on now...)

[hack124x768]

Now having trouble getting diodes in all the right places. I went ahead and hacked another ps2 softmat so that it would work with my ps2-usb converter to get me by, but I still want to make this dumb thing work.

[Kurt_]

I say add some more power.

To trigger a button press, a certain amount of voltage and/or current must reach the IC. If the resistance of a button/switch is too high, not enough voltage or current reaches the IC. Straightforward and pretty common knowledge around these parts, right?

So my solution is to pump more voltage and/or current through the resistor, so it WILL trigger a button press. It doesn't need to be through the whole game pad, just hook some voltage lines directly on to the buttons.