Project Update: Amazing Dance Mat
The mat's been completely soldered up. However, I had to use a soddering gun that had a rather large tip and the solder itself was sort of big. It wound up being a two man job. David sent his dad to help me since he was in charge of the build site. Today's a teacher work day after all. XD
After exposing the connections, I discovered that the mat, being a third-party product, had differently colored wires. This is a bad thing. I went to the internet to try to find diagrams, but I was a tad pressed for time, and couldn't find a very clear one, so, like a genus, I GUESSED! :D Yeah... I prayed that the yellow wire on the mat was still the useless one, matched up the greens and reds, then guessed that black went to brown, and blue went to white.
But, after attempting my first connection, we found that the gun tip was too big, so I just hacked off the entire xbox part (I don't even know where my original xbox DDR game is, and besides, Nathan just pointed out that the mat now works with a 360), and directly soldered the wires to each other. After soldering (David's dad held the gun and wires which had been twisted together, and I held the sodder), I put a small amount of orange electrical tape on each connection to keep them from touching. I had put sodder over every exposed bit of wire, so I was very confident about having no shorts (and even if I do, I'm screwed anyway). Then, David's father flattened the connections against the wire, and I just wrapped the whole thing in a lot of black electrical tape. The whole thing looks very neat and tight. I haven't tested it yet since I'm not even supposed to have it at the build site, but it looks great. I'll be very (m/s)ad if it doesn't.
*UPDATE* I currently have the mat plugged in to my computer. Nothing's blown up yet. ALWAYS a good thing. Windows detects that a USB device is there, but that its drivers aren't installed. Excellent, because when I plug in a hacked off USB cord with nothing on the other end, absolutely nothing happens. However, when I run XBCD, (X Box Controller Driver), it doesn't pick up the device. O_O
**UPDATE** The wiring is wrong. :( I have two options: Build whatever the hell this is and use it to test what each wire in the xbox controller does, or just redo the connections until they're right. *sigh*
The mat's been completely soldered up. However, I had to use a soddering gun that had a rather large tip and the solder itself was sort of big. It wound up being a two man job. David sent his dad to help me since he was in charge of the build site. Today's a teacher work day after all. XD
After exposing the connections, I discovered that the mat, being a third-party product, had differently colored wires. This is a bad thing. I went to the internet to try to find diagrams, but I was a tad pressed for time, and couldn't find a very clear one, so, like a genus, I GUESSED! :D Yeah... I prayed that the yellow wire on the mat was still the useless one, matched up the greens and reds, then guessed that black went to brown, and blue went to white.
But, after attempting my first connection, we found that the gun tip was too big, so I just hacked off the entire xbox part (I don't even know where my original xbox DDR game is, and besides, Nathan just pointed out that the mat now works with a 360), and directly soldered the wires to each other. After soldering (David's dad held the gun and wires which had been twisted together, and I held the sodder), I put a small amount of orange electrical tape on each connection to keep them from touching. I had put sodder over every exposed bit of wire, so I was very confident about having no shorts (and even if I do, I'm screwed anyway). Then, David's father flattened the connections against the wire, and I just wrapped the whole thing in a lot of black electrical tape. The whole thing looks very neat and tight. I haven't tested it yet since I'm not even supposed to have it at the build site, but it looks great. I'll be very (m/s)ad if it doesn't.
*UPDATE* I currently have the mat plugged in to my computer. Nothing's blown up yet. ALWAYS a good thing. Windows detects that a USB device is there, but that its drivers aren't installed. Excellent, because when I plug in a hacked off USB cord with nothing on the other end, absolutely nothing happens. However, when I run XBCD, (X Box Controller Driver), it doesn't pick up the device. O_O
**UPDATE** The wiring is wrong. :( I have two options: Build whatever the hell this is and use it to test what each wire in the xbox controller does, or just redo the connections until they're right. *sigh*
Labels: Dance Mat, Project Update
posted by Leviathan at 11/03/2009 04:18:00 PM
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