Anyone opened up an official Dreamcast controller ?

hand_held · Post by **hand_held** » Sun Feb 13, 2005 2:06 pm

Hi,

Has anoyne out there opened up an official dreamcast controller, I have one sat on my desk and I'm trying to figure out where best to cut it in half.

Has anyone used the Hall effect sensors off the PCB ? I am planning to run them to the top on a few wires.
I really like these controllers as they have a low profile and the analogue stick is made up of 4 hall sensors so only uses a small ammount of space.
For my design I need to split the controller in half with about 200mm gap between the left and right sides. has anyone tried this and had any problems. The left hand side is just the analogue stick and the d-pad and one other hall sensor for the left trigger stick. The right hadn side has the micro and all other controls.

Cheers,

hand_held

Post by **Sparkfist** » Sun Feb 13, 2005 2:44 pm

Yes Jack has talked about using the original controller for a DCp. However you'll most likely be cutting the PCB into three sections; anagloge stick, left trigger and d-pad; memory card slots and start button; and A,B,X,Y and right trigger.

G-force · Post by **G-force** » Sun Feb 13, 2005 3:34 pm

You know you don't have to cut everything off, you can use a different D-pad and just wire it to the board. Same for the a,b,x,y buttons.

One thing you might be able to do for the analog stick, L ,and R is desolder the light sensors and solder them to a piece of PCB board, and hot glue the trigger onto the board. Then you would just wire the light sensors to the DC controller board. I'm pretty sure it would work if you could do it.

Or just use an unofficial controller.

JackFrost22 · Post by **JackFrost22** » Sun Feb 13, 2005 4:33 pm

i just used some scsi cable to wire the stuff of the board and I used hall effect switches mounted on a pc board

G-force · Post by **G-force** » Sun Feb 13, 2005 4:35 pm

What's a hall effect switch?
You should put up some pics jack, so we can see your work.

HK-47 · Post by **HK-47** » Sun Feb 13, 2005 4:39 pm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall-effect_switch

JackFrost22 · Post by **JackFrost22** » Sun Feb 13, 2005 9:12 pm

G-force wrote:What's a hall effect switch?
You should put up some pics jack, so we can see your work.

Yeah i found my digital camera but it has no card

hand_held · Post by **hand_held** » Tue Feb 15, 2005 12:15 pm

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the feedback, I decided to remove the VMU connector and chop out the pcb area in the middle where the VMU connector is. This gives me two nice PCB's I can position either side of my LCD screen.

I will try to work out how to get pictures onto this forum so I can show you all the progress of both my hand held's.

Thanks.

hand_held