Hori Hayabusa and Hayabusa Silent Optical Joysticks

I was debating about even making a post about this because for some reason I felt like that this isn't entirely engineering related, but on the other hand it's also one of my hobbies. So let me lay out some of the details and we can see if this is useful to anyone else.

About four months ago(I think, I can't remember exactly) I purchased a Hori Hayabusa joystick and it works pretty well. It's somewhere inline with the JLF. This isn't really a review of the joystick. Anyways, a wonderful person known as Kowal through Shoryuken forums came up with a fantastic octagonal restrictor gate.

Hori Hayabusa Original w/ Kowal Octo Gate

This is what the original Hayabusa looks like with the restrictor gate removed. I'm holding up the Kowal octagonal gate right above it. There's nothing entirely too special about it other than it's just something different than the very commonly used Sanwa JLF joystick.

However, I'm posting it to bring attention to the fact that the silent optical Hayabusa is... ehh.. I don't want to say significantly different, but it is different enough to prevent swapping restrictor gates.

The Hori Silent Optical Hayabusa joystick shown on the left with it's cover off is just different enough to make things complicated. It's restrictor gate on the right has latches and mounting holes that are different enough that swapping gates out is complicated.

It isn't however impossible, because there is sort of a quick destructo-modification that you can do to put the Kowal gate, but it requires destroying the original gate and at the time of this post there isn't a way to purchase a backup if you super ruin the original. Overall that sounds like a bad idea.

I also don't really know how effective the destructo-mod is so I'm reluctant to attempt it until there's a better fall back plan. I did think it was kind of interesting upon finding this out, my initial thought was... well, I suppose I could try to CNC something out of aluminum or polycarbonate. If no one comes out with a better solution, I will come back to this to idea, but currently I'm working on some more interesting projects. So I expect to have some more quality posts here in the new future. The summer has not been completely wasted.

Optical Sensor installed in Qanba Q4 Fightstick

A hobby of mine is to use small arcade style controllers to play fighting games. I'm pretty decent. Anyways, I recently found that an optical sensor existed that could replace the microswitches in the joystick. The microswitches act as a mechanical sensor that detects movement on the joystick (up, down, left, right, and the corner combinations). These are all well and good, but having a silent joystick that is slightly more precise is more my style. The only complication is that the special optical sensor required a power source and while I could have soldered something directly to the circuity inside my Qanba Q4, I wanted the option to switch between the optical sensors and the microswitches without having to solder and unsolder every time between the two.

So I designed a little pcb that would facilitate as a USB to power hub. The intention was to make the cord modular from the fightstick so instead of having an always connected power cable, the cable could be removed completely. Also, the power for the Qanba pcb and the optical sensor would connect to my pcb and could be disconnected when switching from optical to microswitches.

So this is the board. Super small, super simple. Sadly, I was not able to use it. Not because it didn't work, but because I did not have the proper connectors to attach to the Qanba pcb. Dupont cables didn't work, molex didn't work, and the do-it-yourself wire connectors that are in the instrument room here at Purdue didn't work either.

I'm under the impression that the wire connectors that Qanba uses are special or at the very least not very common. While iteration ALPHA didn't work, I plan to go back with iteration BETA to hopefully use my design, but because I wanted to use the sensor last night I had to improvise.

I'm not sure if anyone knows the name for these particular connectors, but if you do please email me because I don't know what to search for.

Also because I was really annoyed that every photo of the Qanba Q4 pcb was taken by a potato, here is a better photo of it with no modifications and I've unhooked the microswitches along with the power connector from the USB cable.

Here is my improvised cable soldering. I was really hoping to avoid soldering so that I could keep it simple for others to implement, but c'est la vie.

It's kind of a bad photo, but the main points to take from it is that I'm pulling 5 volts (red) and ground (black) from the USB power cable. The other four colors are direction inputs for the Qanba pcb.

So here is the final connection scheme. I recycled the Sanwa microswitch cable that was already being used with my JLF stick (the joystick itself) for the directional inputs, and the important part is that you can see that the power and ground connectors are soldered to the USB power cable.

Everything worked out a lot better than expected after I already gave up on finding a proper connector at 11:30 pm. Minimal soldering and the optical sensor works very well. I don't expect there to be any questions, but if you're looking at this in the future four years from the date of this post or something like that, feel free to send me an email. I'll probably respond unless the internet stops being a thing in the future.