Make:

wow, thanks for this - i'll post up on make about your question (i didn't get mine yet). i'll also look in to the + sign thing.

phillip m. torrone
associate editor
MAKE magazine


MAKE Faire is almost here! April 22-23, 2006.

I was a little light on information before. I should have mentioned that I was using "Joystick and Gamepad Tester 1.9" to get information about the game pad. It's available from <a href="http://alphaomega.software.free.fr/joystickandgamepadtester/Joystick%20And%20Gamepad%20Tester.html">the developer's site</a> (long URL). I haven't actually opened up the pad yet to see what's inside.

I ordered the pad shortly after it was posted here, and received it on Friday Jan 27 via UPS. I don't remember the return shipping address (d'oh!) but I'm in Southern California. I'm hoping everyone else is receiving theirs, and you're all being brave with your screwdrivers.

I've noticed in other projects there are often several versions of the hardware shipping at the same time. I'll inspect the markings to see if there's a hardware revision number or anything and report back in the morning. (My sisters are currently playing <a href="http://www.stepmania.com/wiki/Downloads">StepMania</a>, so I can't check now.)

The back of the pad itself is all white, with no labels or markings. The control box at the top is stickered, and it also has a hot-stamped number below the sticker.

The only potentially useful information on the sticker is: "Kraft Game Pad" at the top, and "Mfd. by SCI Promotions, Inc. Ontario CA 91761 MADE IN CHINA" at the bottom.

Very faintly, below the sticker, I've got a 4-digit number hot-stamped into the black plastic. (Serial?) It's 5213.

There are just six small screws and a single pressure catch holding the case shut. They're all exposed, no labels to peel and no glue to contend with! This is shaping up easier than I'd thought.

A piece of clear tape brings 10 leads up and hooks them into the circuit board. The board's basically one-sided and fairly simple -- all the leads look like they're hooking into something in the center that's got a gob of that black epoxy on it. I'm guessing it's the USB controller?

Perhaps I'll take some photos of the inside of this thing. I've never seen anything like this clear tape before, but I don't think it'll hold a solder joint without melting. Does anyone have experience with this?

+++(Three plus signs preceding this parentetical aside aren't showing up in the Text preview, nor in the Html preview.)+++

The only way I know of to connect to that plastic stuff is to use the socket it plugs into. If there isn't one in the pad itself, you can probably steal one from a cheap keyboard as most keyboards use a similar clear plastic stuff.

Also, I built my own ddr pad a while back from scratch and was wondering if you could post some pictures of how craft solved the pressure sensor problem. Making a large electrical switch that is sensitive to only a few pounds of pressure, but dosn't break under a few hundred and still responds from different angles was a real pain. My pad still dosn't work as well as the arcade pads and I'd like to know how the pressure sensors in the kraft pads compare.

So I've managed to rip mine all the heck and here's what I've found out about it. First of all, the actual USB controller is manufactured by GreenAsia corporation, and it shows up as a 4 axis, 10 button device. I can't get any decent readings out of axis 0 and 1, but assume they'd normally be the analog controls. Axis 2 and 3 are the "hat", which works for the directions. Buttons 0-3 are the diagonal buttons. Buttons 8 and 9 are start and select. Buttons 4-7 are unused, probably a relic from other devices based on the same chip.

With that being said, I wanted to play StepMania with my pad. At first, I just settled for having the pad turned at an angle and using the diagonals, worked okay, but not great.

My next great idea was to open it up and hack around in it. I was hoping that maybe I could solder some of the lines together or rewire it or something. The basic connection system is created by two extremely fragile pieces of cellophane with a conductor traced on them. They're seperated by a perforated thin piece of foam. When you step on the spot, it connects the stuff. Pretty simple.

First step was to try and do all the wiring up in the box. Worked moderately well, but I couldn't solder without burning the plastic. Bad news. I tried electrical tape, but that didn't hold all the wires well enough.

Next was to cut open small holes in the mat and connect segments with a wire, also a bad idea as the cellophane is VERY fragile and you will probably end up tearing it, if you're an idiot like me at least.

Final solution was to cut open the entire pad in an upside down U shape, so the top stays connected, but the bottom opens up. This allows you to use hunks of aluminum foil to connect the directions and buttons so when you hit a direction square you're also hitting a button. This way you can hit two directions at the same time because you're really hitting the buttons.

So far this has worked okay, but no real swell. It's good enough, but now that I'm hooked on stepmania, I'll probably be picking up some better pads.

For those that are interested, here's what the wires are for -- right to left looking at it with conductors facing up:

start - button 9
right up - button 0
right - axis 2 +
down right - button 1
up - axis 3 -

short connector here is the conductor

down - axis 3 +
down left - button 2
left - axis 2 -
up left - button 3
select - button 8

It's to the point now where my pad is held together by tape, but still works okay. Hopefully, my mistakes can save some other people.

Excellent! This confirms what I was seeing earlier in software.

Unfortunately, the USB controller (I think?) on the Kraft pad's PCB is underneath a gob of black gunk. (Epoxy?) I've run into this gunk before and tried removing it with acetone, MEK, water, a mildish solution of muriatic acid overnight, heat from a butane torch, and the grinding wheel on a Dremel. No luck yet. The solvents don't have an effect, and the heat from the torch or grinder ends up destroying the IC long before I can get the gunk off. I think it's an "obfuscating epoxy" that's designed to keep us Makers from identifying or reusing surface-mount ICs.

I have a poorly-taken camera-phone image from inside my Kraft pad that I'm happy to share if anyone's interested.

Since there are only ten leads coming up on the cellophane conductors, it sounds like the other inputs are buried in this black gunk. I don't know how to get to them.

I suppose disabling or remapping the "diagonal" buttons and moving those leads to [Up] [Down] [Left] and [Right] would work, but I'd like to keep all the existing buttons working! Sounds like that's what <tt>wagspat</tt> did in the end.

Anyone find a decent way to unbury the controller underneath the gunk? Or maybe see these "dead buttons" (Button 6 - Button 10] traced out somewhere on the board that we can get to?

I have the working guts from a Gravis GamePad Pro. If the [6] - [10] buttons on the Kraft circuit board aren't accessible, maybe I'll try shoehorning the PCB from the Gravis pad into the Kraft pad and hijack the 10 buttons to the traces coming up.

(I'm hoping that unmasking the traces on the Gravis board and soldering them through the cellophane conductors coming up from the Kraft pad will give me "button pushes" -- but I'm totally open to suggestions!)

The image from the front of the PCB in my Kraft Gape Pad should appear below:<br>
<img src="http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b167/dlong_/pic09.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="480"><br>
The cellophane and leads come up as black traces, and there's double-sided tape below them. The tape is only half-peeled for some reason. That circle in the middle is the "gunk".<p>


The image from the back of the PCB should appear below:<br>
<img src="http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b167/dlong_/pic10.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="480"><br>
Not much to see on the back except the surface-mount stuff that didn't fit up front and a few jumpers. Also, I thought it was funny that they're using heatmelt glue to reinforce the cables. I wonder if the person who put this board together had to jump around when he or she accidentally stuck a finger in the hot glue... seems like that always happens to me!<p>

Under linux, the Kraftpad is listed as a USB Joystick; GreenAsia Inc is the vendor. FC4 recognizes it and loads the yealink phone driver. What this means to average Linux user (me) is that it may not take much to get a driver working with it.

And you really do not want to remove the black blob -- it will destroy the chip since it's the same as removing the top off of an IC.

How does the cellophane attach to the board?
Are there any leads exposed on the board or is it connected to a connector of any sort?
Is there anything that you can solder against available on the board?
Has anyone tried to superglue a lead to the cellophane "cable"?

Thanks,

Rick

The cellophane is connected under the black rubbery bar thing shown in the first photo from dlong above. If you flip that over, you have easy access to a substantial amount of the leads. It also has a piece of tape that is on there for no apparent reason. It might be easier to work with those leads after removing the tape. At the very least, if you break them, they'll be easy to fix.

The the best of what I could see, there isn't much you can solder to on the board itself, most of it is covered under the black epoxy. It's a very simple board. This is why I went with the aluminum foil and slicing open my mat.

In reality, it doesn't seem like this provides many hacking opportunities, espeicially if you want to make it a really good may. My best suggestion would be to sacrifice another gamepad and wire it into the buttons on there if you want to preserve all of the directions. I just chose to sacrifice some. I think that I'll end up buying a better pad instead.

Does anyone know anything about the four wires? There's a post on the StepMania page about Dance Pads (http://www.stepmania.com/wiki/Dance_Pads) that says "It can be easily opened up to cross the wires and make the arrows map to buttons instead." Unfortunately, whoever wrote that in their wiki didn't elaborate.

I'm a little hesitant to just go crossing wires in a USB device, as I'd rather not fry my motherboard, but this seems like a plausible solution for using this pad with StepMania. The real issue is that you need the directional buttons to map to joystick buttons, and the diagonal buttons can map to the hat switch. If this is as simple as just cutting and swapping two connections, this would be an extremely easy hack.

I used a yellow clip from a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/B000095SDW/ref=dp_primary-product-display_0/103-5013723-5823035?%5Fencoding=UTF8&n=284507&s=kitchen">Chip Clip</a> set to create a custom wiring harness. It was just wide enough and fits OK in the head unit with only a minor modification.

I still think it's an imperfect solution! Buttons 6-10 are just buried in the controller chip and I'm using the X- and Y-axis buttons for diagonals. But using StepMania, those [Left]+[Right] and [Up]+[Down] jumps seem to be working ok.

Now I just have to button everything up.

Custom wiring harness? Could you please post some details, at least about how you were able to switch the main directional buttons from the x- and y-axis to buttons?

Oh, sure.

That cellophane with the traces on it was very difficult for me to work with. I wanted to redirect the buttons coming up from the footpad to the PCB in a different order, but couldn't solder to the plastic. Taking a queue from <tt>wagspat</tt> I didn't want to start chopping up the vinyl of the footpad area or slicing down the cellophane because I was worried about getting everything back together again.

So I made a photocopy of the cellphane coming through the top of the footpad and used that as a template. I drilled 10 holes in the vertical ridge of a Chip Clip that were centered over the traces on the cellophane, and fed 16-gauge stranded wires into each hole, folded the wires over the top of the vertical ridge, and twisted them closed.

At first, I couldn't get a very good connection. I scored the inside of the little cavity in the Chip Clip with an X-Acto knife and filled it with hotmelt glue to provide more pressure against the cellophane.

From here, I have actual wires (10 colors!) that I can solder directly to the PCB in the correct order . I haven't done the final soldering yet because I want to cut the wires shorter first, but these stranded wires connect great to the pads on the PCB. I'm reusing the original cellophane ground trace from the footpad, and I've taped back the "excess" length of the other traces so they can't accidentally make contact.

It's still not perfect because now the diagonals are on a hatswitch instead of the cardinal directions, which means I can't hit [Up-Left]+[Down-Right]. That's more acceptable since the StepMania games don't use the down diagonals, but it's still annoying that the USB chip has 10 (ten!!) buttons, but we can only have at six of them.

I'm not sure if my description of this custom wiring harness makes any sense. It helps if you have a Chip Clip and the Game Pad handy to see what the heck I'm talking about. I may try and get a decent picture later, since I have to disassemble anything to clean it all up before the cover will close properly.

Ah, so you're switching the wiring on the pad side of the pcb. That post on Stepmania made me think that it would be possible to switch the wires on the USB side of the PCB... one of the four wires there.

Thanks for the details, dlong.

Courtesy of Stepmania:
http://www.stepmania.com/images/screens/Dance%20Pads/usb_kraft_diagram.jpg

I ended up modding my pad by cutting four traces on the PCB and soldering two wires. I also pulled one cap. The mod disables the lower left and lower right inputs. They aren't used in stepmania so it works fine. It's a fairly easy mod, but you have to be adept with a small soldering iron and an exacto knife.
I've done 5 pads already with this mod and they work perfectly.

pastro, mind sharing some pics? I'd love to see what you did. I've been looking for a relatively simple way to do this.

I'll get some pictures when I get home tonight.
Basically what I did was a couple mods directly on the PCB to swap two of the joyhat inputs to button inputs. I chose to not connect anything back up to the hat inputs since if you by mistake were stepping on one of these inputs, they would block the other hat inputs.
Btw, the quality control on these pads doesn't seem real good. One of the pads that I modded had two capacitors turned 90 degrees. The pads were all adjacent so instead of the caps being mounted horizontally across two pads, they were vertical across the wrong pads. I'm glad that it wasn't the first one I looked at...
I

I created a website with the pics and the text writeup of how I modded my Kraft pad to work with Stepmania.
http://kraftpad.tripod.com/

thanks pastro, I'm going to work on it this afternoon, I'll post anything I come up with or have problems with.

I also created a <a href=http://www.phobe.com/cheesy/>page </a> with a pictorial how-to modify it -- swapping the left and down with start and select buttons. Hope it's helpful.

And I also noticed problems with their quality control. :)

Pastro, I made the modifications according to your instructions, but my LEFT arrow isn't working. What part of the PCB should I be troubleshooting?

The left arrow is the one that is fixed with the instructions for
4,5,6,7.
It moves the left arrow to button 3.
I would look at your connections at c11 and c12.
Also, until you put it together, the pad doesn't make good connection to the PC board unless you press on the black neoprene bar. Once it's put back together the connection works fine. Are you testing it, assembled?

Lars,
Nice page! Btw, I wanted to use the select and start also, but the first pad I had, the start didn't work so I went on with the left and right bottom corners.
Also, I think you might consider disconnecting the start and select inputs since if you are playing solo mode (which I never do) you might be likely to step on the up and upright and hit the select when you are a couple inches off and the controller would block that combination.

I chose select and start because they were easy to rewire on the PCB, and also because they would unlikely to ever be needed in any simultaneous combination during a game. While I haven't seen a game use the corner directions in simultaneous combination with the orthagonal directions, I guess it is *possible*, so I chose S&S as the best option.

Of course, if S&S don't WORK on your pad, well then, you gotta do what ya gotta do. ;)

It's a good idea to test the pad out completely BEFORE disassembling it, so you don't end up scratching your head trying to troubleshoot their bad quality control.

"Also, until you put it together, the pad doesn't make good connection to the PC board unless you press on the black neoprene bar."

yah, that threw me for a while playing with is disassembled trying to ring out the buttons->wires mapping.

Not a bad idea to disable start and select if you only play single player. I use a metal pad for stepmania, but I never, ever, ever need the select and start buttons (they're on the controller box for the pad, not the pad itself). Stepmania lets you control the game using only the main directional arrows. So if you're likely to never need Select & Start, it might be a good idea to disconnect them completely to avoid conflict. (Select and Start are the outer-most connections / wires on the pad)

I noticed the loose connection with the black bar, and was testing while pressing that together. I think that I may have been a bit overzealous with cutting traces, and may have severed the wrong one inadvertantly. In any case, I've got a bunch of buttons that don't work, so I'm thinking about just scrapping the whole thing.

It's usually a pretty easy fix to bridge a trace that is cut by mistake. Scrape the trace on either side and make a solder bridge. It would be pretty hard to lose a bunch of buttons unless you cut a bunch of traces. Can you take a closeup picture of the board and maybe we can debug it from the photo. Are you testing with the box screwed back together?

ok so i dont know much about this so i have a lot of questions. i just got my kraft pad today.

is there a way to make it run on os x (so that it will work with stepmania) without having to open it up and mess with it?

I used the joystick and gamepad tester software and all it did was gave me a textfile. what do i do with that?

what were the little round spongey things that came with the pad?

Piff-

Should work fine with StepMania for OS X, as long as you don't want to press [Left]+[Right] at the same time or [Up]+[Down] at the same time. No screwdriver required.

Plug the pad in first. Then open StepMania and configure the controls. Arrow down to "Option" and press [Enter]. Then arrow down to "Config Key/Joy Mappings" and press [Enter]. The flashing marquee at the bottom of the screen should get you the necessary instructions from there.

Of course, any "jumping moves" in StepMania won't work without some sort of modifcation. The easiest modification is to play "Pump" instead of "Dance" or turn your pad a quarter turn and reconfigure the black buttons instead of the white ones.

Good luck...

on the <a href=http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/02/10_kraft_dance_pad_hacking.html>blog thread</a> about the kraft pad hack, someone claimed that stepmania works under OSX and the kraft pad without modification, including support for L+R and U+D. YMMV.

That's interesting. If true then the problem is in the driver and not the hardware.
Has anyone ever reported that OSX has the joystick axis issue?

My dilemma is that two of the screws (both on the left side, with the blank side of the pad on top and the black panel near me) are in there pretty well and are somewhat stripped. I'm a bit hesitant to just ripping the plastic casing off for breaking something.

Any suggestions for what I should do ?

Thanks
(first time poster and MAKER)

Do you have a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007LV524">left-handed drill bit</a>? That should help you get the screw out without damaging the plastics and you can replace it with a screw that doesn't have a damaged head.

I was going back to my pad (sitting on the shelf for a couple months) and I finished it up according to the http://kraftpad.tripod.com/

When I tried to plug it in, it was not recognized by stepmania at all. :(
I looked at the diagram and noticed that there was a couple wires connected together
[it came like that from the factory] that weren't on the diagram.
I posted a picture of it here - http://users.adelphia.net/~themizzhouse/gfx/solder.jpg

Should I cut these wires off ? Any other things I should I observe ?

Thanks.

so I'm having similar problems about buttons not being too responsive. I found that they do respond if I apply pressure to the black foam that makes contact with the pcb but once I let go with my fingers, it's a bit of a crap shoot. I haven't looked into actual soldering until now which is how I found this site. However, from what I gather, it seems as if the soldering method is offered here strictly as a way to make the pad compatible with Step Mania, not to handle issues with the pad being unresponsive. So I guess I'm simply confirming whether the soldering method should apply to me or not. Thanks.