After gutting the controller, and soldering leads from all the buttons out to jumper wires, I created a little box to put it all in, and give me some basic controls for navigating menus and such, with the device itself.
In the picture above you can see the basic buttons on the device for Up/Down/Left/Right/X/O/Start/PS, the control buttons needed to do simple system navigation tasks, but not for actual playing.
The other things on the box are the tap points that I can connect external switches, or a micro controller to, and thus rapidly prototype new controllers, or experiment with computer based control.
The first thing I crafted using this box was a controller specifically made for Pinball, in particular the game "Zen Pinball" on the PS3.
This worked really well. It was crafted in one day using some thick plexiglass and a bunch of arcade buttons from one of my previous projects. I basically hooked up all the buttons to the tap points on top of the previous box, which was inside of the pinball controller.
The only real problem with this setup, was that it blocked all access to my taps into the controller, so essentially it was now ONLY a pinball controller, that could not be used for anything else unless disasembled.
So after some time I decided that wasn't good enough. I needed to still be able to experiment with controlling this thing through an Arduino or computer, AND play Pinball, and hell why not some fighting games, and clasic arcade titles.
So I broke out my trusty Hanaho Hotrod arcade controller. Opened it up, and added the PS3 Controller guts to it, wired it up, made a few holes to run wires out, and its ready for action.
Essentially I now have an awesome arcade style controller for the PS3, that also has the added functionality of tap points on the back of the unit, to plug in other external switches, or control via micro controller.
Ultimately I want to hook an Arduino to it, and program combos in fighting games, or the perfect timing in a golf game, etc etc...
An arcade control panel for PS3, with computer control, wooo!
