PiGRRL Button installation need advise

caver01

@tonaytan It sounds like you are on the right track. You have two boards that both want to attach to the GPIO headers. Obviously, only one can occupy that space. I was looking at the Adafruit step-by-step and it looks like they are using a ribbon cable. One end connects to the GPIO pins, the other end goes to the display, but not all wires make the journey. It looks like they cut the unused wires at the display end (so they are still connected to GPIO) and solder these to the inputs. One will be a ground, the rest must be unused pins. Does this sound about right?

Then, in software, in addition to setting up the display, you would load the Adafruit Retrogame driver/script to define which pins are for what buttons. That assumes that the display doesn't need them all, and that enough remain to make the controls usable.

I know I am not being very specific, but I have never built one of these. I am sure someone here has and possibly with your hardware config (or at least something similar).

tonaytan

I just want to know if I can solder my Buttons with a GPIO PIN will the CPU burn off?

caver01

@tonaytan heh, you can if you are mindful about which GPIO you use. Some pins supply power (3.3v, 5v), others are ground. Every button should get a common ground on one side of the switch. You could use a single pin for this and daisy chain it to every switch so they all share the same ground in parallel. The other side of the switches will each require their own pin, and you obviously don't want to wire them to the power pins. Which ground and which open pins you use will depend on what is available after you find out what your display is using. There are a lot of resources online that show the pins folks are using for things like buttons. I would be surprised if there isn't already a pigrrl tutorial out there that suggests which ones to use.

caver01

Maybe your button PCB already does the parallel ground for you. . .

tonaytan

as a quick update i asked ADAFRUIT and today I am going to solder the pins on the pcb and trying to get some signals

caver01

@tonaytan sounds like they were designed to work together. That’s good!

tonaytan

could get it to work :)

caver01

@tonaytan said in PiGRRL Button installation need advise:

could get it to work :)

You did? That's great! Will you post some photos here? I am considering this project or maybe the mintyPi. I might like to see how you did it.

lsolazzi

How did you manage to work with the lack of gpio? soldering the pigrrl pcb to the raspberry? i can't find any examples of waveshare and pigrrl pcb. I would really appreciate if you could attach a picture or say how you solved it. Thanks!

tonaytan

so i soldered everything then connected the display got it to work with that guide https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/295/retropie-and-waveshare-32b/2 after that i installed GPIOnext https://github.com/mholgatem/GPIOnext by using gpionext configure as a keyboard. worked fine

tonaytan

so guys i had problems with the GPIOnext and the waveshare driver that i had. They both used pins at the same time.
Thanks mholgatem the programmer of the program he gave me some commands to type in,to configure the buttons with the right pins that are usable. So guys i wired this thing just with the single purpose of using pins who are not used and dont damage the raspberry or the display . So the commands are with my ports .

MY SETTINGS
[
sudo python3 /home/pi/GPIOnext/config_manager.py --pins 3,5,22,10,7,29,31,32,33,35,36,37,38,40

gpionext set pins 3,5,22,10,7,29,31,32,33,35,36,37,38,40

gpionext reload

sudo reboot
//if you soldered your wires to different ports you can add them in the line down below !
[
sudo python3 /home/pi/GPIOnext/config_manager.py --pins 29,31,32,33,35,36,37,38,40

gpionext set pins 29,31,32,33,35,36,37,38,40

gpionext reload

sudo reboot
]