deskthority

Hello!

After stumbling over this thread via google I thought this forum might be the right place to get some help realizing my project:

I'd like to connect my USB arcade stick to my iPad. Problem is: The iPad only works with USB HID keyboards.

A lot of games work with the iCADE, an arcade stick that emulates a keyboard by sending two keystrokes per button use -one on press, another one on release. The full button mapping can be found here:
http://www.ionaudio.com/downloads/ION%2 ... 20v1.5.pdf

What would I need to build something like this:

USB Joystick -> Small thing with USB in and USB out -> iPad

The "thing" should do some kind of USB Joystick to USB keyboard conversion and be icade compatible (sending keys on button press/release). Also, it should be programmable to support different Game Controllers. I would really love something like that for my arcade sticks. Any suggestions?

Well the hardware in that thread would be fine. The only alternative I can think of is wiring a second controller (e.g. a Teensy) inside the joystick. It's quite likely you could do that without removing the original controller, and it would of course be cheaper.

Question is: can you code?

Last time I coded was on a 386, so I may need some help with that as well.
I've played around with Basic, C and assembler, but I'm not sure if any of that would help nowadays.
From the looks of it, it doesn't seem too hard to adapt things I read about modifying a SNES controller (like this for example), but I may be wrong.
The only difference would be that I'm using a USB input and won't solder the contacts directly. Not sure about how much additional coding would be necessary to get this work with the second USB port.

Assembler is always useful indirectly; it means you have an idea how things really work

There are lots of examples around you could adapt from, so you'd probably manage... we can help as well of course!

For the USB-USB approach, a good start might be this. Essentially take that joystick host code, mix in a keyboard device example, and you're left with very little to do apart from decide which buttons map to which keys!

OK, that's probably trivializing it a bit - getting the joystick host code to work nicely with your joystick might take some tweaking. But it would be at the easier end of the scale, since you only want it to work with one particular joystick, rather than cope with all sorts of different ones.

I just ordered my Leonardo and Host Shield 2, too bad they won't arrive for another two weeks. I'm pretty sure you'll see me again

Thanks a lot for your help!