Electronics

We decided to go all out with our pads and integrate lights under our arrows. This complicates the entire process and adds quite a bit of confusion but in the end I think it was all worth it. At first we wanted the lights to come on as we stepped down on the arrows but we realized that would take some additional electronics and really something we couldn't take out of storage and plug it in to the Playstation and just play.

First we nailed our microswithes to the inside of each of our 4 arrows. The hardest part is trying to figure out how high to install these switches. You want them high enough so they take as little pressure as possible to activate them but not to high so that if someone heavy steps on them hard it won't crush these puny little microswitches. We bought the kind of switches with metal levers so you can install them a little on the shallow side and just bend up the metal to make the switches more sensitive without having to remove and reinstall the switch.

For lights we're using super bright (10000 mcd) white LEDs. I purchased 100 of these awesome and extremely useful LEDs on eBay from a manufacturer in Hong Kong for ~$25 including shipping. Of course we only need about 16-32 of these lights but at that price you can use them to replace lights in your car, PC, flashlights etc. To install the lights we just used hot glue and bent the LEDs to the appropriate angle.

To control our pads we bought two $4.99 PSX controllers from Wal-Mart. Just rip out the PCB board and remove the L and R hardware as well. You'll want to run a ground wire to all the switches and LEDs. You can use the middle contact from the L or R button to solder the ground wire to. Oddly enough all the PSX pads I've seen have small circle contacts for each button on the PCB . These are perfect for soldering a wire to making the wiring quite easy and reliable.

All thats left is to plug them into your PSX or PC with an adapter and try out a game. Adjustments may need to be made to the switches, foam, or controller if you wired the wires in the wrong places.