Gamepads making involuntary movements in Emulation Station

Addison

@brunnis The USB adapter thingy that I use with the SDHC card has a red light indicator.

When in use, it stays red, when sending or receiving data, it begins to flash the red light off and on.

I'm guessing that this might possibly cause some instability with my Pi.

I was really happy though when it finally went three plus hours without a single improper input signal.

That had never happened before until yesterday.

Pussyfoot

@brunnis Excellent work! Here's a tip for anyone else attempting this: Instead of desoldering the original capacitors, cut the heads off at the top of the capacitors so the existing leads remain. Trim the leads to the new capacitors and solder the new cap's leads to the existing ones poking out of the board. I suggest taking a picture of the board with the original capacitors BEFORE you start. Why? You may forget how the polarity went. Electrolytic capacitors have a positive and negative side.

Brunnis

@Pussyfoot Thanks!

Please see further updates in my Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/7g2d0n/howto_fix_phantomghost_input_on_ibuffalobuffalo/

Clyde

@megafacehead said in Gamepads making involuntary movements in Emulation Station:

To get around the problem i've been using the mayflash wii u pro controller wireless dongle.Google it.Simply sync your pro controller to the dongle, then the dongle tells the pi the wii u pro controller is actually a wireless xbox 360 controller and is detected as such in es when assigning buttons and i can say with 100% certainty there is no ghost input while using this adaptor.

Thanks for the hint. I already owned the Mayflash Wii U Pro adapter, but used it only with my PC that has no bluetooth itself. I never tried it with my Raspi.
The adapter seems to have fixed the ghost inputs from my two Qumox Wii U Pro controllers. I'll have to test them for longer periods to tell for sure, but first tests look promising.

Pussyfoot

@brunnis I just did mine tonight and am testing it out. I take back the tip I said. there's not enough leads to do my trick. Just desolder it and solder the new one in. Also the polarity is printed on the board, which is nice. Make sure you leave enough leads to bend it down after you solder it. In fact, bend it BEFORE you solder it.

Brunnis

@pussyfoot Great to hear! Looking forward to hearing about your results.

Pussyfoot

@brunnis I didn't do the 10uF capacitor. Just the two 22uF ones. I left it on overnight and Emulation Station is exactly where I left it.

Brunnis

Nice! What was the average frequency of phantom presses before the mod?

Pussyfoot

@brunnis said in Gamepads making involuntary movements in Emulation Station:

Nice! What was the average frequency of phantom presses before the mod?

It wasn't too bad. I noticed it when watching a movie through Kodi. The movie would stop all of a sudden. I didn't notice it in Emulation Station for a while. Probably since only left-right motions would be picked up.

I saw a spurious left move got triggered this morning since the menu option changed. I put in the 10uF capacitor now and I'm going to keep testing. I went into Kodi's settings and put it in the middle of the options page. That way I can tell if a move up/down/left/right was triggered.

Pussyfoot

Okay, I just noticed an up movement. I wouldn't have detected that had I not been in kodi. I still get movements even with all the capacitors.

Brunnis

@pussyfoot I noticed a similar thing now as well. I was testing the most unstable of my controllers after having applied the fix. I had actually run a 16 hour test on this one before, but I thought I’d do a 24 hour one like I’m doing on the others. Turns out it still seems to generate a phantom press on average every 8 hours or so. It’s an enormous improvement compared to before the fix (phantom presses every few minutes), but obviously a bummer that it doesn’t completely fix all controllers. It does seem to completely have fixed another one of my more stable controllers, though.

I took apart this controller again tonight and installed the missing cap at the input and also resoldered all components in the power supply path. Running a new test over the weekend. If that doesn’t completely solve the issue, I will just use the controllers anyway. A phantom press every 8 hours isn’t much of an issue.

Brunnis

Good news! As I wrote in my last post, I made another attempt at fully stabilizing this controller: I populated the position marked as C41 with a 22µF cap. This position is unpopulated out of the box (which is because the manufacturer has deemed it unnecessary).

I also resoldered the SMD components in the power supply path (both 5V and 2.5V) by quickly dipping the soldering iron on each side of the components, melting the solder. This has to be done very quickly, or you risk damaging the component or desoldering it completely.

The result: I left RetroPie sitting in the ES menu on Friday afternoon and when I came back today it was still in the same place. That's 69 hours without any phantom presses! Well, I guess there's a very minute risk of it having moved and gone back to the same place, but it's significantly more likely that it just hasn't moved.

So, for anyone still having issues after applying the fix in the original post, I'd suggest first adding the 22µF cap at position C41. If that doesn't work, perform the mentioned resolder.

EDIT: I'll be back with final test results of all controllers later this week.

Rion

@brunnis Why don't you test out the controller in the command line using jstest? As long as you ssh client don't disconnect you could clearly see if there are any movements at all.

By the way great job finding out what seems to be the root of the problem!

Clyde

@rion said in Gamepads making involuntary movements in Emulation Station:

@brunnis Why don't you test out the controller in the command line using jstest? As long as you ssh client don't disconnect you could clearly see if there are any movements at all.

Another idea: Stream the input from /dev/js0 (or whatever js device the controller is mapped to) into a file. If the file gets bigger, ghost inputs occurred.

cat /dev/js0 >ghosttest.txt

edit: Alternatively, omit the >ghosttest.txt and watch the screen for funny characters to appear.

Pussyfoot

I just added the capacitor and left it on Kodi settings on the skin setting. If it moves any direction, I'll know.

Pussyfoot

@rion I'm trying out

jstest --event /dev/input/js0

in a Putty window.

Pussyfoot

I haven't had a chance to look at the display, but I'm getting some output from jtest:

Event: type 2, time 397626870, number 0, value 5742
Event: type 2, time 397626880, number 0, value 0
Event: type 2, time 397758600, number 1, value -32767
Event: type 2, time 397758600, number 1, value 0
Event: type 2, time 401954150, number 0, value -5406
Event: type 2, time 401954160, number 0, value 0
Event: type 2, time 402109800, number 1, value 337
Event: type 2, time 402109810, number 1, value 0
Event: type 2, time 402480700, number 1, value 16552
Event: type 2, time 402480710, number 1, value 0
Event: type 2, time 403222120, number 1, value 337
Event: type 2, time 403222130, number 1, value 0
Event: type 2, time 403485030, number 0, value -16216
Event: type 2, time 403485030, number 0, value 0
Event: type 2, time 404585240, number 0, value -5406
Event: type 2, time 404585250, number 0, value 0
Event: type 2, time 404633300, number 1, value -16216
Event: type 2, time 404633310, number 1, value 0
Event: type 2, time 406905280, number 0, value 337
Event: type 2, time 406905290, number 0, value 0
Event: type 2, time 409262200, number 0, value -5406
Event: type 2, time 409262210, number 0, value 0
Event: type 2, time 410590300, number 1, value -32767
Event: type 2, time 410590310, number 1, value 0
Event: type 2, time 411523080, number 1, value 16552
Event: type 2, time 411523090, number 1, value 0

This looks like analog, yes?

EDIT: I don't see any movement. Unless there was movement, but it ended up back in the same exact spot, I'm going to assume that so far, the controller is working.

Brunnis

Don't know why I didn't use jstest before... I'm running it now. The controller I'm running on has already been connected to the Pi for 44 hours without any button presses (that I've been able to detect in the menu, at least). I'm running jstest through SSH in Cygwin, in parallel with EmulationStation, so I'll be able to observe if any phantom presses registered by jstest show up in ES.

@Pussyfoot It does look like you've received a couple of full presses (-32767), so I would expect those to have produced a visible effect...

Pussyfoot

@brunnis I know, but the the selection in Kodi was on the same exact spot as I left it. Maybe it's true that it moved off and moved back. I still have it up, so I'll check it later today.

jonnykesh

@pussyfoot Both of those full inputs were UP presses on the D-Pad.

#UP
Event: type 2, time 12916484, number 1, value -32767
Event: type 2, time 12916556, number 1, value 0

#DOWN
Event: type 2, time 12917476, number 1, value 32767
Event: type 2, time 12917580, number 1, value 0

#LEFT
Event: type 2, time 12918228, number 0, value -32767
Event: type 2, time 12918380, number 0, value 0

#RIGHT
Event: type 2, time 12919188, number 0, value 32767
Event: type 2, time 12919268, number 0, value 0