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Step 3Prepare parts
The next thing you will need to do is prepare the parts for their new lives.
The keypad controller i used has a black carbon coating on it's traces. To remove this I carefully scraped it off with a screwdriver, then once most of the contacts were exposed i used rubbing alcohol to clean off the remnants. I then tinned each of the 12 contacts on my controller board with solder.
Next is the actual case of the guitar. Frets on Fire requires buttons for navigation, cancel, and strumming, so I added four small pushbuttons in the upper body of the guitar, a leaf micro switch for strumming, and a button where the volume dial was as a back button. The back button's recessed fit makes it hard to hit accidentally.
I also had to modify the fret board since it ran all the keys off a single ground. This required me to cut the trace linking the buttons together, strip back the green masking on the circuit board, and solder new wires to the freshly exposed circuit trace for each button. I then found it's matching wire at the bottom of the board and twisted them together to keep from losing track of which pairs match up.
Next I painted the fret keys. The normal color pattern for a guitar hero type controller is green-red-yellow-blue-orange. Make sure you know which buttons on your guitar fit which holes in the neck. I didn't notice that each of the buttons on my guitar are of slightly different sizes until after I'd painted them.
The keypad controller i used has a black carbon coating on it's traces. To remove this I carefully scraped it off with a screwdriver, then once most of the contacts were exposed i used rubbing alcohol to clean off the remnants. I then tinned each of the 12 contacts on my controller board with solder.
Next is the actual case of the guitar. Frets on Fire requires buttons for navigation, cancel, and strumming, so I added four small pushbuttons in the upper body of the guitar, a leaf micro switch for strumming, and a button where the volume dial was as a back button. The back button's recessed fit makes it hard to hit accidentally.
I also had to modify the fret board since it ran all the keys off a single ground. This required me to cut the trace linking the buttons together, strip back the green masking on the circuit board, and solder new wires to the freshly exposed circuit trace for each button. I then found it's matching wire at the bottom of the board and twisted them together to keep from losing track of which pairs match up.
Next I painted the fret keys. The normal color pattern for a guitar hero type controller is green-red-yellow-blue-orange. Make sure you know which buttons on your guitar fit which holes in the neck. I didn't notice that each of the buttons on my guitar are of slightly different sizes until after I'd painted them.
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Nov 8, 2009. 2:38 PMxxInSAniACxx
says:
you kinda lost me here. so the basic idea is to hook the fret buttons up to the number pad right? If i was making my own fret buttons, could i use piezo's as triggers for the frets and make a button to go over it, or would that not work?
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