HOWTO: LED control with a Pac-Drive

savetheclocktowr

I wanted my cabinet to illuminate the right buttons for each game I play, because I'll be damned if I can remember which beat-em-ups use two buttons and which use three. It took a lot of effort, but now that it's done I've written it up:

https://gist.github.com/savetheclocktower/c7644597c9c4c3990b7fee363d5f03c1

Even with these directions, this project requires at least a little comfort with the command line. If you've got RGB LEDs, you won't be able to follow these exact directions, but it should at least give you a sense of the approach that worked for me.

obsidianspider

@savetheclocktowr This sounds really neat. Do you have any photos of it working?

savetheclocktowr

@obsidianspider I'll do you one better. If you'll pardon the shakiness, here's a short clip of me launching and quitting a game:

http://gfycat.com/RingedImpressionableButterfly

NBA Hangtime is one game where I mapped the controls to mimic the button placement on the machine, rather than use the first three buttons. So each player uses buttons 1, 2, and 4. Hence those are the ones that light up when the game starts. When the game ends and I return to EmulationStation, all the LEDs light up again.

The hardest part of this, honestly, was figuring out how to get the Pi to talk to my LED controller. I could've done the same thing without any extra hardware by using the Pi's built-in GPIO pins, but then I've got other plans for the GPIO and that would've monopolized a lot of the pins.

edmaul69

@savetheclocktowr thats pretty cool there. also love the your screen name.

GtBFilms

That is an awesome mod! And one which I'm very tempted to try myself, as soon as I can justify replacing all my buttons with LED ones!

Thanks for your hard work!

mirmite

so i have gotten a pac-drive and have been tinkering alittle on my windows pc,

but gonna go for rpi in the arcade insteed, and stumbled into this,

that way seems to be oriented in a pure mame machine,

while i will be using difrent consoles and so on, and its impossible to make a file per game, seeings i would use 500gig of games,

have you worked more on this or have anyone a better solution that is more system oriented?

Clyde

If anyone gets the error "pacdrive: error while loading shared libraries: libhid.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" with Retropie 4.4 on a Raspberry Pi, use this command to fix it:

 sudo mv /usr/local/lib/libhid.* /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/

It will move the libhid files to the correct location where pacdrive can find them.