Bunker Project Log

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bD4_nSK2Mc]

I’ve been really slacking on this, and pretty much every other project in the log, so I figured I better do something.

I pulled the guitar open again to fix the mistakes I mentioned in the last installment, and Pottse helped take some footage of the guitar in action. You’ll notice a few things:

1) The pedal is really loud.
2) I’m not very good at playing with it.
3) I use the Star Power switch at the head of the guitar by pressing it against my cheek at 0:54 and 1:23.
4) I still haven’t figured out the whammy, but I’ve got a bunch of ideas.

Mrs. G and I tried to watch Renaissance?tonight, but we only got 20 minutes in before Version 2.0 (the gigantic 4 month-old boy super-smiley blob-thingy)?decided it was screamy time. Wifey took one for the team, and I decided to get back to the guitar.

I’ve been trying to come up with a good Whammy mechanism, and what I’m settling on (but still haven’t quite figured out how to do) is some kind of motion sensing thingy.?Since this is the goal, my first priority?is to disable the motion-activated Star Power switch. Since?Star Power is also activated by one of the buttons on the guitar face, I can retain the functionality by?moving that switch somewhere easily activated by the fret hand.

Here’s the?Star?Power mechanism. I always assumed it was a mercury switch, but I swear I hear something rolling around in those deceptively capacitor-looking cans.

Basically, all I need to do is add another switch to the series. Luckily, the board has four extra traces with pre-drilled holes and nice, clean, unlacquered solder pads! It’s my lucky day!

Eazy cheezy,?lemon squeezy. The original black wire gets moved to the new solder pad on the lower right. Then, two long wires are added to be soldered into the toggle switch. At this point, you should not be noticing the hideous soldering. It is merely an illusion.

Here is the more intimate side of the aforementioned switch:

Now it’s time to move on?to the Star Power activation switch. I had to stop for?a few minutes and walk through the problem. Where do you put this thing? It needs to be?accessible, and out of the way at the same time. The head seemed obvious, but where? At the bottom (on the edge that faces the ground) the button would be accessible by the index finger, but what if you were holding down a note with that finger? On the top, it is accessible by the thumb, but that is a critical part to keeping the guitar balanced and in position, since the strap is loose. If worse comes to worse, you could tap it against your cheek, which is almost exactly the same motion needed to activate the motion sensor switch.

In the end, I decided to put a button on?both sides. It isn’t much more to do and leaves the decision completely up to the wielder.

On to wiring this up. As you can see in the picture above, the two switches are wired in parallel.?Now I have to make the connection to the actual control board.

Here, I luck out again. That little wire on the left just hanging out had a sliver of that gray ribbon insulation on it, and was only left so that a blob of solder could be made to jump between the two ground circuit traces. This must have been a design oversight by whoever laid out the board.?(Yes, I should have taken a picture of the other side.) Of course, I used that spot to solder in my ground wire.

Now, I’m to my mistake. I can’t remember which button activates Star Power… Start or?Select? The buttons on this guitar are different. One is raised, the other recessed into the body. Of course, I?assume that the raised one (Start)?has to be it. The designers of the guitar would surely want to recess the annoying pause button! Right?

So I go with that, and?screw everything back together.?I start up the PS2, plug my?homemade switch in.?Strike one! It?doesn’t work any more! I’ll have to track that one down, but until then, I’ve got the fancy, but very difficult Yamaha pedal.

It isn’t long before my foot is aching. The 3-note?riff?diddy in “Smoke on the Water” is killing me. What’s worse is, I can’t hit the?Star Power notes! It’s going to be a little hard to test this thing without getting enough juice to activate it… Strike?2!

Finally, I just decide to start mashing the buttons to see what happens. The good news is, they work. Both?of them. The bad news is… you?guessed it!I picked the wrong?one. I am the proud owner of the?Guitar Hero guitar that has the most accessible pause function! Strike 3!

All in all, it’s not bad. More soldering to do next time. At least I?know?that everything is functional.?

The?head, with all the?doodads:

?Now all that’s left is solving the Whammy problem. Stay Tuned. Same Bat time, same Bat channel!

After putting the rodents to bed, Mrs. G, Pottse, the Berserker and I all sat down to watch Hot Fuzz, in HD no less, on the 360’s HD add-on. I could whine about how M$ had?screwed?me for months with?the crappy Dynamic Range Control?bug (fix here)?and how I really want Blu-Ray to fail because it is associated with the PS3, and how I bought 300 on Blu-Ray anyway, because it was cheaper, but I won’t.

?All that aside, after the flick (which was great), Mrs G. went to bed, ?P and B went to play on the Mame cabinet, and I decided to crack open the Yamaha Sustain Pedal. I was quite happy to see my suspicions confirmed. The switch has?poles for both normally open, and normally closed. Boyakasha!

Note those leaves soldered together… boo!

?Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the normally open side was soldered together, so I spent most of my time separating them. If I weren’t a bonehead, I would have a desoldering bulb, but I am a bonehead, so I don’t. I ended up doing the “heat and flick” thingy, which sprays burning hot solder anywhere. But, as I said, the kids were in bed, so it’s all good.

Slapped together again, messily.

?Soldering everything back together was standard. The new switch threshold was not. Since the closing leaf is further away, and as the original operation required the switch to open only the smallest amount, I was forced to lengthen the white plastic switch block by a millimeter or 3. I did this in the most okey-doke way I could… jamming straight pieces of copper wire in the center hole cutting, then cutting them down, and finally taping over the whole mess. All I can say is, it works.

This is a repeat picture, but notice that little white plastic piece on the left. That’s where the rubble went.

?So, now for the trying. Of course, the guitar is still in pieces, so my attempt was with the thing spraying screws all over the room, and my “missing” hand was used to hold the whole thing together.

?But it worked!

There are a few problems. The switch is noisy, and… it may not be as good as my original cardboard frankenstein doodad. My foot hurt worse, and it is so sensitive that my unstoppable toe-tapping really hosed my score. But… it worked!!! So, I’m going to quit for the night, and try to dream up a whammy solution that works.

I had my first real roadblock today. Pottse was reading a Musician’s Friend? catalog, and I was reminded of the pedal that came with my crappy Midi keyboard. (Of course, I could have used that if it weren’t buried with all the rest of the crap in the storeroom… do you see a trend here?)

?Anyway, I dug through the catalog and found the keyboard?sustain pedals. I’m not the most music equipment savvy guy, but I am pretty sure they are just a switch with a 1/4″ plug. This serves?my purpose well, and they are anywhere from $13-20 for the cheap ones. Right within my threshold of pain.

?So, I did the exact opposite of what I usually do, and bought the thing at a Guitar Center?brick and mortar store after having checked it out online. Luckily for the big gigantic megacorp, they are?owned by the same place, so it’s all good.

The pedal of excititude (Yamaha FC5 Sustain Footswitch), in vivid color:

I plugged this in to an 1/4″ to 1/8″ adapter and tried it out. The menus promptly went berserk, scrolling endlessly up.

Now, because I am an arrogant, know-it-all moron, I immediately assumed that because the jack was Stereo, and the Plug was Mono, I just had to suppress the second switch input. I tried this by wrapping the 1/4″ plug in a narrow band of electrical tape. This wouldn’t fit in to the adapter. I considered nail polish, but that would take too long. Ultimately, I opted on ripping the guitar open and snipping one of the leads. Brilliant.

Okay, the deed is done, and I go back to try again. Same thing happens. However, this time it occurs to me to put the Pedal on the groovy multimeter I spent all that money on all those years ago. The verdict? The switch circuit stays closed until pressed, at which point it opens. This would be the opposite of my need.

This leaves me with a few options. A relay (too slow?), a transistor (too complicated), ripping apart the switch and making it work the way I want it to (too expensive, and may not work anyway), and finally, ditch it and try something else.

I think I am taking the last option for the moment. But, I did notice that some of the other Keyboard pedals had potentiometers in them… perhaps this is a possible whammy solution? The mind reels…

So I made it to Radio Shack and bought some jacks and plugs and switches. The jacks and plugs are standard 1/8″ deallies. Exactly like yer newfangled Walkman has. Here’s how they came out:

I was more concerned with the switch, and basically took a gamble. I bought a Submini Lever Switch, a Roller Lever Switch, and a pack of 4 Momentary?Pushbutton Switches.

For the first prototype, I slapped together some trim I had laying around, cardboard from the day’s Tanga shipment, and the Roller Lever Switch. I made a rough cavity in the trim for the switch to sit in, then taped it all together. Ghetto fabulous.

Here’s the side-view:

And from the top, with the cardboard lever pulled away:

Surprisingly, it worked like a champ. However, since some Bunker Party bonehead erased my GH saves, I was forced to test with the first five tracks. “Infected” again. On medium this time. To prove that it worked, I went through the entire song whilst holding the camera in my strum hand. Before I knew it, I had 900 megs of video of my foot hitting a switch. Mesmerizing.

?Here’s a preview:

The problem is, after a single song, my foot/calve really started to ache. This could be a manifestation of my colossal wussiness, or maybe this ain’t the best way to deal with the problem.

So… now that prototype I is complete and semi-successful, I will entertain the weirder ideas. These range from tongue-clickers, voice activation, some kind of thigh-master-like doo-dah, and… others… too horrific and terrible to describe.

And, what about the Whammy? Right now I’m thinking a something similar to how the mercury switch works for Star Power, but for any movement that the guitar experiences in general. In other words, you shake the guitar, and that invokes the whammy response. (The existing mercury switch would have to be disabled, and Star power activated solely by a relocated start button.) This could be as simple as an almost frictionless potentiometer with a small weight on it (if that even exists), to a full-blown accelerometer like the Wiimote has. (Which is probably way out of scope of this project.)

If you’ve got any ideas, feel free to email them or share in the comments!

I’ve always felt guilty that Stub lost his hand whilst cutting trim for the DDR Room. I thought I would start atoning by making it possible for him to play Guitar Hero.

Unfortunately, the Bunker Workshop is full to the brim with crap, I almost broke my neck just getting in there.

This is the current state of my workbench. If my dad could see this, he would drive out and kick my ass. Usually the week before he comes out will be spent cleaning stuff like this up.

So anyway, back to the job at hand. I’ve never opened a Guitar Hero Guitar before, but I’m betting that it’s a simple matter of two switches for the strum bar, which Stubby can’t hit, and a pot for the Whammy, which stub can’t… well… wham.

Here’s the victim, an Ant Commandos Freedom V. I’ve chosen it because, none of the Bunker Party regulars will touch it with a ten foot pole. I thought it was decent, until the jerks at Red Octane screwed with GHII and made it unusable without an adapter (which never really worked right anyway.)

A bunch of screws later, I get to the soft gooey center.

I’m happy to see my assumption proven correct. Two big dumb switches, waiting to be jumped.

My plan is to install 2 jacks, one for the replacement strum bar, and one for the whammy mechanism. Unfortunately, the Rat Shack is closed, and if I do have any jacks around, they are lost in the aforementioned workshop. For now I will solder the leads, and test them bare, hanging out of the body.

Solder 1:

Solder 2:

Now, I had planned on a single switch for the strum bar, then realized that all of the menu navigation requires the up and down strum. So it’s off to add one more wire. Also, that 1/8″ jack will become stereo instead of mono. I also would have loved to use some red wire, but that must have been buried somewhere. Red tape will have to do.

Solder 3:

All that remained was a quick continuity test, then it’s off to the console.

Besides the hour I spent actually finding the receiver units, everything went perfectly! I navigated through the menus using either of the green wires, and played through “Infected” with 5 stars (on easy… whatev.)

Stay tuned for the trip to Radio Shack and the design for the actual actuator… whatever form it may take.