Forums » Input, Adapters & Controllers » How to Make a PC Compatible Control Box for a Metal Dance Pad

1
Hey guys! This thread is where I'll start a "How To Build A Control Box* For My Metal Dance Pad To Work On The PC"

As with any DIY, I am not responsible for any damages or wasted money you may encounter during this process.
I'm sure this tutorial isn't the first of its kind, but I haven't seen one on this forum yet. I'm here to share my knowledge and ideas and to help everyone else enjoy stepmania with their dance pad. The primary goal here is a quick, cheap and solderless path to making your metal dance pad work with your PC without it looking pretty. The bare minimum, the more effort you want to put in, the more expensive it will get. The more features you want, the more expensive it will get. You get the point.

Solderless you say?! Yes! The only tools you'll need are:
Multimeter - To find out what wires are what
Screwdriver - For the screw terminals
Wire stripper - Or equivalent, needed to expose the wires needed

Still with me? Good!
Step 1 -
Identify what D-Sub connector your metal pad uses. Check the plug on your dance pad and see if it has 9 or 15 pins, and if its male or female. See the first post here: http://www.stepmania.com/forums/input-adapters-and-controllers/show/2097

Using that as our example, its a D-Sub 15 pin female connection.

Step 2 -

Now go to amazon or ebay and look up listings for D-Sub 15 pin 3 row MALE (<- important) breakout boards. Buy whichever, just make sure it looks like it will plug into your dance pad's plug. If you have a 9 pin, search the 9 pin one.
Use ebay to search for a zero delay encoder board. These are normally $10 give or take. Buy it now!

Step 3 -
Once everything is shipped, now its time to get serious! Plug the breakout board into your dance pad and use the multimeter to find out your common ground wire and which wires are your arrows. I'll make another post on how to do that in detail. For now, we'll use the pinouts for the dance pads I happen to own:

8 Arrow Pinout
2- Up Left
3- Ground for 2 and 4
4- Up Right
5- Down Right
9- Down Left
11- Right
12- Left
13- Down
14- Up
15- Ground

6 Arrow Pinout
5- Ground
7- Up
8- Down
9- Left
10- Right
14- Up Right
15- Up left

Once, again if you have another metal dance pad with different pinout, feel free to reply here so the rest of us can use that info. I'll also update this portion as well. Unfortunately I do not have any pinout info on 9 pin connector pads.

Step 4 -
Grab your zero delay encoder and a couple of the wire connectors. Since this is the bare minimum tutorial, you'll only need 4 pairs. [If you want 6 arrows, then use 6. 8? then 8.] Plug those into the bottom row of the board. This board is common ground so we can cut the extra wires from the connectors here. In the picture the white wires are ground. We only need 1, so cut all the other ones out. Afterwards snip off the ends of the quick disconnects from the blue wire and have some of the wire exposed, about 1/8" If you use the red/black wire pair. The red wire would be cut away.




Step 5 -
Now that you have your 5 wires ready to go, take your breakout board and start hooking up the wires. In this case I will be looking for where pins 11-15 are. The most important part here is hooking the ground wire to the correct pin., which is 15 here. After that just hook up the other 4 wires to the other 4 pins. The direction does not matter, you will configure that in stepmania anyways.
Take the screwdriver you have and loosen the screw terminal, stick the wire in the gap and then tighten down, rinse and repeat.


Step 6 -
Get the usb cable supplied and plug that into the encoder board. You can also plug in your dance pad again now.


Step 7 -
Plug it in to your computer! The led light should be lit. The drivers should have automatically installed and when you test them out buttons 1-4 should work.**


And there you have it! A bare minimum, no soldering needed replacement box* that works for PC for roughly $20.

*There's no box...

** I've tested this setup a couple of times and it would randomly drop notes, probably due to static buildup or something like that. I added a ferrite core to the wires between the zero delay and breakout board and it seemed to have helped.

Video of results:



EXTRA STAGE!
Spoiler (click to view)
Since you've made it this far, maybe the DIY bug has bit ya and you want something more flashy. I do recommend if you don't know how to solder, go learn how to do it! It's not too hard to learn and the possibilities are endless after that.
This is the part of the tutorial where more money/time/skill is involved. I won't go into complete detail, this part is just to give you some ideas.
Of course the bare minimum result looks janky, it'll need an enclosure of some sort.
Stuff you can use without much effort:
DVD/PS2 game case

Money:
Project box

DIY box:
Tools needed
Rotary tool - used to cut the holes for the wires and connector
Hot glue gun/double sided tape - to secure the board to the box

Optional
Push buttons - For Back and Start on the box itself, can find at Radio Shack. Look for normally open buttons
Soldering Iron - used to solder the wires from the board to the push buttons mentioned previously

Here I bought a project box that was similar size to the original control box for the dance pad. I drilled out 2 holes for the buttons and used the rotary tool to cut out the space for the connector to stick out. You do need to solder the wires to these buttons to make sure they don't disconnect. That's why this wasn't included in the main tutorial.



Last edited: 6 January 2016 6:46pm

Reply
Nice tutorial for a USB controller. I was going to say that the board you bought doesn't have input capacitors so you'll probably blow the board from static when playing you may want to add cap's on all the inputs (I don't know if you can add cap's without soldering though you may need to get a terminal strip attach one end to the USB and the other to the terminal strip attached to the d-sub wire and make sure you understand capacitors are POLARIZED the long leg is +). Also I would recommend shoving foam inside the control box just to help with shock absorption in case you drop it, it's a dance pad controller so it's going to be treated badly. In fact ignore the mounting tape, screw that d-sub on the box if you can radioshack sells screws and nuts that will fit through a common d-sub mounting hole it's the #40 *hint*, then shove foam around the circuit board that way it will be easy to mess with if you need to but still secured so it won't move inside the box when it's all screwed together.

Again nice tutorial for people that are uncomfortable soldering.
Reply
Thanks for the input!
By any chance you know what specs are suitable for input capacitors? I was searching around and couldn't find anything definitive that would work. Yea that board is really cheap, the ones I normally use are about $60 because they're normally used in multi console joysticks.

When I have more time again I'm thinking of doing another DIY that involves soldering and other things to make these same dance pads work with other consoles. "Pad hacking" is the term normally used in the joystick modder community. I'll be using that knowledge and applying it here.
Reply
Hi there!
I know this thread hasn't been looked at in a bit, but I tried to find a different thread on how to find the common ground wire and the wire for the arrows. But I couldn't find it. I'm unfortunately extremely visual, so while some threads say "put the multimeter on (numb) or (different numb) or (another different one) or (yet another) or... etc etc" and then have the other side "anywhere else" I have absolutely no idea what this means and I just sit here wondering. Anywhere else? Like... not on the breakout board? Or ON the breakout board on another spot? I know, I'm sorry for how absolutely dense that is.

I haven't ordered the breakout board yet, but I plan on getting one so I can fix my current DDR Game pad (based on a thread on a different forum on how to make it more responsive) and make a usb controller box using the breakout board along with a Win7 compatible USB controller (which yes means I will be doing some soldering but I can do that.) I figured I'd ask before I purchase it and have it coming so I know what I need to do. >.> Even just a single picture would be helpful for my overly dense head. ^_^;;

Thanks in advance!

Last edited: 28 February 2016 12:32pm

Reply
If you know how to solder, you can save a few dollars buy just buying the solderable dsub connection you need. In my case I need to connect the pad to a male end.
Pic of connection coming from the pad:


Pic of solderable dsub end:
Front

Back

Solderable Dsub way:
Multimeter testing between pins 4 and 5


Between pins 1 and 5


Using the breakout board:
(Ignore the GND labeling on the board, it's not used in the same way for the application we need.)
Testing with pins 12 and 15


Testing 1 and 2


This is all assuming you are pressing on the arrow you want to find out of course. I hope this helps, and feel free to ask anymore questions.

Last edited: 28 February 2016 5:23pm

Reply
Well I learned my lesson about assuming the site didn't log me out while writing a post. Let's try this again...

This thread is very helpful, thank you for it. I would like to submit an additional pinout to this discussion.

I just purchased a used DDR Game brand Tournament Metal Pad, 6-arrows with LEDs under the 4 main direction arrows. I believe it is version 3.0, but I am not sure how to confirm that. If anyone can help me identify this, please let me know. The box has the official DDR Game logo on both sides and lists the manufacturer part number as M03797.

The pad itself has a blue 15-pin, 3-row, VGA type FEMALE plug. The pinout is as follows:
1 – Empty
2 – Up-Left / X (+)
3 – Arrow Switch Common (-)
4 – Up-Right / O (+)
5 – Arrow Switch Common (-)
6 – LED Positive (+)
7 – LED Negative (-)
8 – Empty
9 – LED Positive (+)
10 – LED Negative (-)
11 – Right (+)
12 – Left (+)
13 – Down (+)
14 – Up (+)
15 – Arrow Switch Common (-)

After further research, I found that this pinout matches this page here: http://www.popsynth.com/platform4.htm

Despite the 2 connections for each polarity of the LED circuit, all the LEDs are wired together and thus they all flash at once. I double and triple checked the pinout above even pulling apart my board just to make sure I knew what I was doing. It is obvious that these boards are hastily manufactured, the pieces are lazily assembled and the wire colors in the board are not consistent. Be cautious of this if you are looking to modify anything inside the board. For example, my left arrow has a white wire for positive and black for common, while my right arrow is the exact opposite. Don't rely on the wire colors. The people I bought the board from are the original owners and they definitely didn't modify anything inside.

My board did not come with a control box, so I ordered a DDR Game brand 4-in-1 box for the ION pads. I will create a short adapter cable to switch up the pinouts. I really wanted more options than just a single console. I also ordered the parts to make my own USB box like the one in this thread.

I hope this helps someone.

This is not a photo of my actual board (since mine is in pieces), but it looks the same. Right down to the DDR Game Logo.


These are photos of the actual box that my board was in.


Last edited: 17 December 2016 12:10am

Reply
The pad in the pictures is a DDR Game Tournament v3.

I picked up on of those recently and was planning on building a new controller box to solve some issues with a 12 year old Smart joy PS2 to USB adapter I have.

my question is if you have already built out your control box to confirm the pin out and also was there something specific you did with the LED? ( 6,7, 9 & 10)

I have not started building my controller box but it seems like these pins for the LED are just for power? or am I over thinking this?
Reply