Phiveball

Here you go. Top Panel dimensions and spacing.

Yes, I sized the picture 8x10 using Gimp, took it to kinkos to have it printed. I then place the lexan over it after I had drilled the holes and used an xacto knife to cut the holes in the pic. I will try to find the top panel drawing I did that had hole spacing etc and post it for you. It may help with your positioning of the picture. I didn't mark where the holes would be on the pic because that leaves no room for error. Also, this is really improtant if you are going to do the directional buttons instead of a stick, I just finished installing diodes in the wires to correct the up diagonals. You must have a diode on both the up and left/right wires going to the diagonal buttons. Otherwise, the wires will trace back to eachother and will not work properly.

Honestly, you can find tutorials galore all over the web. Your best resource, IMO, is www.slagcoin.com. Read it beginning to end and you should be good to go as far a knowledge goes. My best advise would be to take it slow and think each step through. I spent a month, easily, on planning, drawing, and redrawing before actually buying a thing. As far as the art, you're on your own. This was my custom stick, and I like it being one of a kind. Just download Gimp from http://www.gimp.org/, get some sprites from http://dustloop.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8287 and add some color. That's all I did. I spent an evening playing with the software and filters. (I have never used photoshop or other similar software prior to this) Or you could find some much higher quality art using google. Besides, if you're going to go through the time and expense required to make one, wouldn't you want it to be unique? Here's a pic of the inside to give you an idea of how everything is mounted. http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/5135/img3528u.jpg The wiring is a mess, though. Because it was hidden, I wasn't too concerned about making it pretty on the inside. I used cat-5 wire from the inside of an ethernet cable. You could buy better wire, but I had a broken cable, so it saved me a little money. Check out some video tutorials on youtube to see how the wiring is done. The info is all out there to do this. I was in your shoes a few months ago. I don't know your experience with this type of stuff, but I didn't know a thing about soldering, switches, diodes, carpentry...etc. Another good resource is the tech talk forum on shoryuken.com. Lots of people willing to help and give advise. Trust me, they are much better people to provide you with guidance then myself. Check out the custom arcade stick thread there as well to get some more ideas. Oh, and I purchased my buttons from www.lizardlick.com. Good luck.

Ok. I'll see what I have and will try to post some things for you tonight.

The box is made of poplar (3/4" thick x 2.5" wide). The punch kick buttons are white/clear 30mm simeitsu The yellow buttons on the left are the main directions (up,down, left, right) with down being a 30mm simeitsu and up left and right being 24mm. The white buttons are diagonal up/right and up/left (as of now they are actually just additional "up" buttons that are close to left and right and can be mashed at the same time as the directions, but I am going to fix this with a diode to make them actual diagonals sometime this week. The 3 small buttons across the top are sanwa 18mm for back, guide and start. There are also buttons on the side which I use exclusively for pinball (Happ competition buttons for the flippers and sanwa 18 mm to bump the table left and right) The top and bottom is made from 2 pieces of 8x10 lexan each sandwiching a picture (I just whipped something up using game sprites from this website and Gimp, the free image software) Also, the buttons are mounted directly to the lexan. The small toggle switch at the top is used to switch between left stick, right stick, and d-pad. The detachable usb cable is achieved using a neutrik NAUSB adapter. I had to cut the actual contoller cable and shorten it to about 10" so it would fit in the box. The pcb I used was from a mad catz fight pad (hence the toggle switch mentioned above). There are much cheper options to use. I just had an extra one. I finished the outside with 4 coats of poly, applied with a rag and allowed to dry overnight between coats. I designed the whole thing using google sketchup, another freeware. If you want more pics of the inside or other angles, let me know. I can try to get some of the design drawings up as well if you want. Good luck if you are really going to build one.

Thanks for the kind words guys. The planning, design, and construction of this thing has consumed my life for the past two months. I'm really happy with the result, and love the way it plays, but definitely not something I want to jump right back into doing. This was the first time I've ever done anything like this, and it's really neat to hold something in my hands that was just an image in my head a few months ago.

I thought you guys might appreciate my new gamepad/arcade stick hybrid I just finished building. http://img406.imageshack.us/i/img3527o.jpg/ http://img263.imageshack.us/i/img3525b.jpg/ http://img94.imageshack.us/i/img3526d.jpg/