Yoke Controller
The Yoke controller handle is based on Cadet 2.0 from Thingiverse see here. However remixed so that the mounting works with a 25 mm carbon tube. Also the hat mounting plate now has insets for 3 mm brass melt-in threads instead of 2.5 mm. The base has been reworked for increased strength.
There is a video from the creator of the Cadet Yoke where you can get some tips on the process of mounting and soldering the buttons in the handle. Also note that other parts of the video are not relevant for our build.
The wiring from the Yoke PCB through the yoke tube to the main circuit board requires long cabling with 6 individual wires. I used an old cat5 ethernet (network) cable which contains 8 wires. Try finding a cable that is fairly flexible and soft and has stranded wires, not an ethernet cable for installation which normally is solid core! This is just an example. There are many other viable options, however a cable with a little bit of firmness helps the cable chain to bend smoothly while it still has to be flexible enough to handle the 180 degree roll axis rotations.
The wiring internally can be done with hookup wire, an ethernet cable as mentioned above or a ribbon cable. You can even use standard wire with pre crimped pin header connectors (or crimp your own). You can also solder the bare wires directly or use screw terminals.
All of the components need to be grounded. The ground wiring can be achieved in two ways:
- Shared ground. Connect one wire to a GND connection on the yoke PCB and route that one GND wire up to the yoke buttons in one of the handle sides. Now solder a short GND wire (say black) to the GND post on each of the components and then connect all ends of these with that common GND wire, by twisting them together and then soldering and securing with a shrink tube.
- Individual ground wiring. Route one GND wire from each of the components to the yoke board. This is the intended choice by Gagagu with the PCB design that has a lot of GND connections. However, it will require a lot of wires.
I chose the shared ground scheme.
The buttons signal pin simply needs to be routed to a button input with B. Which button is connected to which number is not important, but it may be logical to group adjacent buttons to adjacent button numbers. Also remember that one of the connections from the hat component is a button (the top press) and it needs to be routed to a B input as well.
The datasheet has the directions and pin mappings as
- Common
- Left
- Center (middle button push)
- Up
- Right
- Down
However, we have the component rotated 90 degrees, and also seeing from the bottom when soldering so remember to mirror the connections from the picture. The yoke hat connects to the B0 to B4 inputs and must be routed specifically to match the detection programming in the firmware. I.e so that moving the hat up corresponds to joystick hat up action in firmware and so on.
| Pin | Yoke board connection |
|---|---|
| 1 | Common (GND) |
| 2 | B2 |
| 3 | B4 |
| 4 | B3 |
| 5 | B0 |
| 6 | B1 |
The pins on the switch have one pin on each side that is farther away from the other two to make out the pins better. In the image B1 and B4 are those pins.
Note
It should be noted that I probably rotated the switch from what is described in the datasheet and what Gagagu has in his project, but if you wire as described here all will work as intended. Otherwise try out the wiring with SERIAL_DEBUG as described in the First Run section to verify hat directions, and if not correct either change wiring or correct in Multiplexer.cpp.
Important
Shrink tube or some other means e.g. electrical tape of insulating the bare metal parts are needed to ensure no electrical short circuits can occur. Special care has to be taken to the buttons that are placed opposite of each other in the top and bottom of the yoke handle. As can be seen in the image above I used electrical tape on the bottom wires. Shrink tube had been a better choice (but hard to fit afterwards).