Cheap Star power pedal for guitar hero

This is a simple tutorial on how to make a star power pedal for your guitar hero controller out of a discarded mouse.
In this case we are going to use the RJ11 port on the guitar controller
If your controller doesn’t have that port , there’s another star power pedal instructable that shows you how to route the pedal to the actual star power button using a jack connector.

Here’s what you need:
Soldering iron
Hot glue gun
Box cutter
Old telephone cable (RJ11)
Multimeter (if the pinout I came up with doesn’t work for you)

Step 1

First open the mouse, cut off the ps2 cable, you won't be needing this.
Then take out the circuit board and locate the contacts for the two switches.
Just to be safe, cut a line (see picture) in the contacts to isolate the switches from the IC, resisotrs, etc…
The ground should already be common to both switches so choose your solder point for the first wire.
In this case I only need one switch so we are going to pair them so both act as one, so you can hit either of the buttons and if one microswitch dies, the other will take over.
Find the contact point for both switches and connect them with a piece of wire.

Now cut one end of your telephone cable and identify the two wires to be soldered on the circuit board. In my case Red and Yellow.

Then solder one wire to the ground and the other to one of the switch points.

Comments

[randofo]

Cool project. Did you mean to add this to the Keyboard vs. Mouse Speed Challenge? You should totally enter this.

[djcalle]

Thx for your comment, I missed the contest!...next time.