USB Game Pad With Tilt-accelerometer Mouse

Step 4 Stop! It's solder time!

 
OK we're basically ready to go. The plan is to solder a single Ground wire to the common ground for all the buttons, then solder a separate wire to each button (the not-ground side). The ground connects to the Teensy ground, the button wires connect to all the solder pads down the side. Then we'll write the code that listens to the button presses and converts them

Cut off a strip of ribbon cable, about 4" long. Use diagonal cutters or fingernails to carefully nip and 'rip' the individual wires apart about 1" and then strip the ends and tin them with solder [see image 4a]. Do this for both sides.

To connect to ground, we'll expose a little copper in the top left corner, this way we don't have the wire running underneath the elastomer [see images 4b and 4c].

Solder the Black wire to the ground plane, we brought the wire through a hole [see images 4d and 4e].

OK lets solder to the first button. The key is to remember to NOT solder to the same common pad but to the opposite pad! Solder the white wire to the 'up' button. There's almost always a hole you can feed the wire through! [see image 4f]

Solder the gray wire to the Right pad, the purple wire to the Down pad and the blue wire to the Left pad [see image 4g]

Then the orange wire goes to the L1 button, the yellow goes to Start and the green to Select [see images 4h and 4i].

I didn't end up using the Red or Brown wires so I tore those off the ribbon. Now cut another piece the same size but with only the white, gray, purple, blue and green wires.

Connect white to B, gray to A, purple to X, blue to Y and green to R1 [see images 4j and 4k].

If you haven't yet, now is a good time to desolder the SNES connector cable. We wont have space for it so just pull each wire as you heat the solder joint (or just cut them short, either way) [see image 4m]

OK! Now all the buttons are wired up, its time to attach them to the Teensy. Place the Teensy in a vise or carefully use a 'third hand' to hold it (grab by the USB connector)

First, solder the black wire to the ground pin [see image 4n].

Next start soldering in all the ribbon cable wires, one after the other, without skipping any holes [see image 4p].

After the first ribbon cable, go to the second piece, starting with the white wire. The last green wire goes next to the blue one on the 'short' side [see images 4q and 4r].

Now we are ready to upload code to the Teensy and test out our work!