Progress Report

It's been a while since I mentioned anything regarding the joystick project, so I thought I'd do that now. It's coming along. The box (case) is assembled, the polycarbonate has been drilled and the Sanwa parts are all in place. The case didn't line up as well as I had hoped, but it's not that noticeable with it all painted black.

The soldering of the arcade parts to the Xbox 360 controller's PCB is an entirely different story. Talk about having zero luck. The solder never sticks; never, ever, ever! I even resulted to only hot gluing the wires in place, and while it works, it's not reliable and the wires still pop off.

What makes matters even worse is that the controller that I bought had the old PCB in it. Why is that bad? There's about 8 common grounds. What does this mean? I have to solder (or hot glue) quite a few more wires to the circuit board. I also had to damage my Sanwa joystick and solder extra wires to it in order to make it work with this PCB. Had I gotten one of the new PCB's, the entire board is wired to one common ground, which means you can daisy-chain all of the grounds and only have to solder one wire.

Bottomline is that I'm having a really hard time right now actually finishing this project. It's very frustrating spending about 12 hours in one day and not being any further along than when you started.