Tutorial: N52te Analog Stick Mod + 6 Button Pedals Footrest (no buttons lost)

[roads]

The Mod has been modified by user ideas so the latest easiest way is:




I strongly recommend the N52te over the Razer Nostromo. The N52te is cheaper, works without drivers so will work fine with the XIM3 even special stuff. The Razer Nostromo will not!!!










Video with analog stick:

moving the stick
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HLE_llcyIE

ingame walk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHMLbhHGH7o

Pengs quickscoping
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VNG-UMwry4

The Borg Pedals in white socks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vheRHy1ReKA

Do it at own risk I don´t take responsibility for your hardware.

First I will answer some questions:
Q:What must I be able to do?
A: You must be able to unscrew some screws and rescrew them when done, solder a wire to a soldering point, drill holes and dremel down some plastic. That’s about all. You need an IQ of 50 to open a banana so an IQ of 80 should be enough.

Q: What is this good for?
This controller mod allows to duplicate the right or left thumbstick of the authentication controller to another device that doesn't have one like the Belkin N52te or the Razer Nostromo. This is a very useful in combination with a xim3. 

Q: Can I still use my controller?
A: The right or left thumbstick is gone the rest works as before

Q: Why not use a G13?
A: The N52te can do a lot more than the G13 with the XIM3, the Nostromo can not its as dead as the G13 with the XIM3 concerning "magic".

Q: Why not use the XIM2 and  a G13 on the XIM3 and it can do the same as the N52te?
A: No way will I run a PC and A XIM2 alongside a XIM3. I could strangle myself in cables or get nuts configuring.

Q: I am a WASD player do I need this?
A: NO!

Q: Why not the left stick?
A: The left stick is possible but you have to desolder the left trigger. As most games have a lefty setting the right stick will do fine. And a slight benefit, programmers tend to forget capping the autofire on the lefty setting. If you still want a left stick mod check in the replies.

Q: I cant make it as ugly as you did?
A: Very funny

Needed tools:
Everything is available at Conrad.de for German readers

Soldering iron, I used 15W point tip / soldering tin, Kolophonium is nice. It has to be clean and well working.
Dremel drill
Screwdrivers
hot glue, (epoxy not needed imho)

Needed parts:

8-wire radio cable 100cm is tested working
2x 18mm M2 screws with female screws, 1x 14 or 16mm screw
Breakboard with single solderings
Potentiometer Joystick and fitting mushroom stick cap with downpress button 10K Ohm



The two orange boxes are the potentiometers and the left box is the push down button. So three feet each for the potentiometers and four for the pushdown. 4 feet holding the chassis. Buying a 6cord cable with a non pushdown stick would also be possible.

Step by Step:

- Open the controller, unsolder the potentiometer of the fire button and remove fire button, open the joysticks potentiometers and remove the drums, scratch the traces in the drums. Solder 8 wires to the stick for example Network cable (recommended length 1.5m).  Solder the fire button back, Potentiometer has to slip in no pressure or you will damage the PCB of the controller.













-  Fix a Joystick to a breakboard slightly bigger than it. Solder the wires to the 8 contacts. Test, if there is movement you have bad soldering.





- Remove the side of the N52te by removing the one screw below the D-pad under the rubber-pad. Cut the D-pad cable. Remove the screw that holds the two parts together, remove the D-pad. Dremel away the L-shaped platics between the four screw-legs. enlarge the hole for the stick by removing the small plastic dome for more joystick movement. Place the joystick-breakboard you built between four legs. One potentiometer up the other one to the left. Turn slightly left for perfect fit. Drill four holes in breakboard above the screw poles and fix it with M2 screws.





- Close the controller and the N52te.




Optional: Pedals

Additional stuff you need:

- 6 light switches that are used in bathrooms they are closed and water resistant. Mine had nice clamps so solder-less there. Double clamps allowed me to bring the red wire from switch to switch)
- 2,3,4,5cm M4 screws with plates and female screws. You need several lengths as you dont know what will fit the housing of the switches.
- 5m nice looking thick and soft 6 wire cable (wires should be at least 0.5mm)
- 1m 2x20 mm aluminium rod
- metal saw to cut the rod
- A drill to drill holes into the Aluminium plate start as small as possible and make the hole larger each step up to M4.
- shrink tubes for the cables between the switches.
- connector 6 pole you really want to make this detachable or you will transport an Octopus from place to place.
- Foot rest to mount the thing. I bought a Fellowes Fußstütze Microban 8035001, dunno if its good yet.


6 Buttons are lost by the mod above and there is really not an inch where you can put an additional D-Pad# + the one button above. I got the idea from the Geekhack  forum, they did some footcontrols and the handicapped thread here in the forum. What I dont like is to move the foot or fingers, I think it’s a great advantage of gamepads that you can have them in place all the time and not risk missing a key and taking the keyswitch delay.
I am not opening a new thread for this as its fast and easy. The 6 wire ribbon you have cut, attack a 6 wire cable to it bring it out of the N52te and attach 5 pedals to it. AS you can see I have no heatpistol so matches had to do. The pedals in my case are switches that are mounted on wall not in the wall so they have a closed case.

The coding of the cables is easy. Each of the 5 wires is connected to the red 6th wire.

Red wire+ 1- 4th wire (far away from red other side) = D-Pad
Red wire + 5th wire (next to red) is the button above the D-pad

x      x     x     x    x     x(red)
¡       ¡     ¡     ¡     ¡ ----¡   Key above d-pad
¡       ¡     ¡     ¡----------¡ D-pad left   
¡       ¡     ¡---------------¡ D-pad right
¡       ¡--------------------¡ D-pad down
¡--------------------------¡ D-pad up

I suggest you make it detachable its enough the controller and the N52te are always together.

 




 


Buy a 1m 20x2mm aluminium rod. The rod can just be bent by hand but will retain its form and be quite strong. Bend it lower, half as high, as I did or you will have to lift your foothead high to press the button.

 





Cables could be mounted below the footplate but I liked the Borgstyle.

[roads]

Updated and its done, man Belkin/Razer could have spared me a couple of hours of work by simply making this an analoge stick. Idiots...

[mist4fun]

Great tutorial, maybe photoshop that green wire? How does it feel? I know it wasn't ergonomically designed for an analog stick and I'm curious to know if it feels natural.

[roads]

Thank Mist, the green wire must stay I had to rewire it completely because of that touch with the hot solder iron. It feels really good. First I was shocked as the thumbpoint did not lie on the stick but almost the joint and I thought you cant change the position of the handpiece. But you can and now the stick lies perfectly where it should. The picture with my hand is the smaller hand setting. I have glove size 7.5 and I need the bigger setting. Your finger tips fall on the second row then, which is fine as you can use the first line for start back etc. . It’s a bit different from the G13 as the stick there is aligned to the front and just tilted a bit. The Nostromo has the stick in line of the thumb. You could change that but you would loose the plastic poles that help fix the stick in place. Btw it’s a lucky fit, there is not even a millimeter more room in there, was quite thrilling. I am quite sad you cant piggy back the stick, I tried but no luck.

[roads]

Update: Added a plastic piece that is to be dremeled away on the controller that is very likely the cause of 401 errors on the XIM2 and why Mist is telling people to loosen screws.It can damage your mod if you do not remove it! Its in "Step 4".

[mist4fun]

It really is an unfortunate oversight that I wish that we (the community) had caught on to sooner. I've seen too many defective units from that little piece of plastic. It's a shame we only found out about it right before xim2 was discontinued. Your tutorial is looking good, any luck on finding out what that part is named?

[roads]

Unfortunatedly not, I still have problems finding a place for the four mini buttons as D-pads (mini button like my Move extra button mod).  I am about to upload a video how the stick moves and a right stick mod. Its quite a pain compared to the right side though.

[roads]

Updated that the Razer Nostromo is a big piece of useless junk.

[tweak]

Holy @#$%, this is awesome.

[roads]

Seems you like it LOL

[roads]

Added another video in the first post in use.

[roads]

I was asked if I would do the mod for someone and I will not, I don't have the time to do so and you cant pay my working hour.
If there is anyone who will do this for other forum members, I guess it should be worth 50$ + shipping + material cost (N52+controller).

[THX1138]

have you tried just removing the dpad on the nostromo and adding the thumbstick from an xbox?  maybe connecting the thumbstick to the corresponding connections on the nostromo circuit board?

[roads]

No, as I am quite sure that would not work. A d-pad is just a connection made digitally and a thumbstick are potentiometers giving out different numbers of k-ohm at every position. That would be the nicest way indeed but you would need an electronics engineer to connect it to usb and obsiv driving it with the XIM3.

[AP]

Right first off a big "THANK YOU" too roads for A) coming up with this mod and B) kindly giving me his prototype Build model.
Plz Dont ask him to make you one, he is a very busy man and wont be able to make you one.
I was just very lucky in that he was making him self a rebuild and offered me his first atempt at it.
Which works perfectly.

All I can really say is that the mod works like a charm, currently we cant use full analog movement because for somereason we just cant get xbox controller to send the right commands to xemulate or to the xim programe either. ( if anyone knows how we can get a xbox left stick to work plz let me or roads know, would love to get it full analog on the xim2, atm it just sends down and right on full all the time :S )
It will ofcause be full analog on the xim 3 becase the stick works fine when pluged directly in to the xbox.

We are currently useing xpadder to get the movement commands to the xim2's which works fine for now.
But its fully on or fully off like keystrokes atm.

I have been looking for someway of bridging the gap between pc and console controls for some time.
the g13 never looked like it would do the trick for me, and when I tryed it in the shops it just didnt feel right, the thumb stick wasnt placed right at all. The n52te did look to be a good choice and I did buy one but after playing with it for a few hours I didnt see any point in it over a keyboard.  Plus the key that is ment as a kind of space bar was just out of reach for my thumb.
When I saw roads mod I knew it was what I was after.

With your thumb on the stick your fingers rest nicely on the keys, maybe not in the standard spots but none the less you have more than enough keys in reach to forfill the needed amount.
This is my current layout with the rest of the controls on my g9x



I have put about 3 hours playtime in to it and I am begining to get used to it, At first its a real brain killer.
Going from not even having to think about what your doing to having to concentrate on every keypress feels like a right drag.

Q:: Will I be useing it over WASD
A:: Yes, WASD works, but letting 1 finger or thumb in this case do the work that normaly takes 3 ?? thats a real bouns, and any loss in speed etc is negliable in my opion. And remember when PC games first came out there was no analog thumb sticks in use( that I know of), just because you used something for years and years doesnt make it the best way to do it!.

Q:: Any problems aside from analog surport on the xim2
A:: Only 1, and its no biggy, I having to get some better grippy footpads as the standard ones slide abit.
But thats it.

If you have the abilty to make this mod, and like the idea of a thumb stick, then make it! you wont be sorry. It is way and above any other analog stick controller/comand unit that I know of.
And I have tryed Both the g13 and sony playstation Nav controller the 2 current popular choices.

Sorry about the massive block of text
I will be talking about it in my next vid ( will modifiy it on to here when I post it )