Switchless DDR Pad Discovery

[dabid]

I joined this forum because I just built my first pad and I've read a lot of posts here before I got started.

I have wanted to make a DDR pad for a while, but two things stopped me:

Building the switches is a lot of work and they won't necessarily last forever. I spent a lot of time looking through instructions and reading forum posts, but was never confident that I could build a reliable pad. I was very intrigued by Sprite's Stealth DDR pad that uses some kind of touch sensor. No moving parts, but it requires calibration. Sounded too risky.

Then it hit me. Make shoes the contacts. No moving parts. The only downside is you have a wire sticking out of your back. So I epoxied some squares of sheet metal to a piece of wood and attached them to a circuit-board ripped from a cheap gamepad. Then I made two mesh covers, one for each shoe. I ran wires from the mesh cover, through my pants, and out back to the ground contacts on the gamepad. This is where things got shaky. The mesh covers were not well made and the wire through the pants was not cool. After playing one song I sat down thinking about how much work I had left to do.

Then I realized that I had made a great accidental discovery earlier. While testing the gamepad I noticed that if I stepped on two squares of the pad and pressed the ground wire to one of the squares, it activated both squares in stepmania. Eureka! The only problem was, just holding the bare wire in my hand was not enough to complete the circuit. It was only later that I took the shoe covers off the shoes and held them in my hands. Amazingly, it worked flawlessly. The Logitech controller I picked for its low price is actually sensitive enough to work with the human body as part of the circuit.

In case that didn't make sense, I'll recap. You hold the ground wire from the gamepad in your hands. The pad itself is just a four squares of metal, each wired to a different button on the gamepad. By stepping on a square you complete the circuit with your body. You must have bare feet and there needs to be a decent amount of surface area on the ground-hand contacts for the signal to register.

Clearly this pad has two major downsides.

1. You have to hold two grounding handles that are tethered to the control box.
2. You must have bare feet.

The latter issue could be fixed by making better shoe pads.

On the other hand, this pad has many benefits:

Easiest pad to build by far.
Probably cheapest hard pad.
Very sensitive and accurate.
Won't wear out ever!

P.S.

Just to clarify. Most of this post is just fluff. The discovery is just that a "Logitech Precision Plug and Play Gamepad" can detect electrical connections between a piece of sheet metal, through my foot and back out my hand.

Whether this is actually useful is up for debate.

[kirbyrockz]

I'm going to take a wild guess and say that the shoes didn't work because they're rubber. Could be wrong, though.
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[dabid]

The shoes worked. I made mesh covers that attached to the ground wire. I strapped the covers to my shoes. After using them once it was clear that they sucked though. There was already a lot of wear on the mesh and they didn't fit the shoe closely enough.

[Agent]

People made ghetto foil contacts attached to the ground and played with foil on their shoes a long time ago. And are you saying you're stomping around barefoot on mesh? That sounds highly uncomfortable.

[dabid]

I figured people had tried to use that idea a while ago. I never found any references on line (probably cause its not a great idea). Anyways, the mesh covers were for playing with shoes. Without shoes, you don't need the mesh. You step directly on the sheet metal with bare feet. That may eventually hurt my feet, i don't know. The point of interest is that I'm using my body as part of the circuit and that a cheap gamepad is sensitive enough to detect the connection.

[spritemanjc]

[dabid]

Devout's pad is cool, but I was referring to this:

http://spritesmods.com/?art=ddrmat

[ChilliumBromide]

Not anything really progressive here. Keep trying. I've been trying to come up with the ultimate sensor for over a year, and the best I've come up with is the hydraulics sensor. This idea hit me in April 2006, I tried to work with it for a couple days, then threw it out. I have a lot more reasons than the ones you came up with for why it wouldn't work, too.

Oh, and I just thought of a new way to do the LASER sensors using only two lazer diodes per sensor and getting a flawless coverage. I'll get back to you guys on that later.
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