Thread: My Budget setup with custom controller

I don’t know if anybody has done this before but here’s how I found out to make a custom controller using an old PS2 keyboard.

Firstly take the keyboard apart and remove the PCB inside.
Throw keyboard away as it is now useless.
The keyboard PCB consists of some electronics some LED’s and loads of contacts.
Now if you get a piece of wire and play around shorting these contacts you can get keystrokes. See the attached pic with a few examples

Then simply wire each of the contacts up to a bank of momentary switches with some common grounds to reduce the amount of wires.

Test by plugging in keyboard and pressing buttons with a document open or use the keycode.exe.

Then map your buttons in keytbl.ini and away you go !

My controller sits snugly under my handbrake and I can feel for the switches,
I have mapped mine to cursor control, play, next, main, vol+/- and enter.
You can wire as many switches as you like if you have enough patience and I’m pretty sure you could re-wire the whole keyboard.
Find Caps lock, (which isn’t too hard) and you have a mode change button to double up all your buttons.


My setup

I wanted a car-pc but I didn’t want to hack my about too much and I didn’t want to spend too much. In the end I kept to my budget of £200

INNOTEK DVD990 widely available on e-bay, it had the all important video and audio input. Video-in didn’t work at first, I could force TV detection on it but it wouldn’t detect automatically, that is until my buddy suggested putting a 75 ohm resister across the wire, clever git that he is.

Pentium 733mhz micro atx
MDF case with low profile tv-out graphics
M1-atx
Reworked BVM2 skin with lots of functions stripped out and nice big visible buttons just right for a tiny screen.

GPS-Microsoft Autoroute 2006, Driver guidance is just big enough to read and of course he talks

Whodwho’s Voice control, it’s really good but unfortunately doesn’t work at all for me on motorway. I probably need a better mic.

PHONE- I haven’t got RRMOBILE or FREEFONE to work properly with my SAMSUNG D-500, if anybody can help please let me know.

Video Capture- I’ve had it working using CAPTURE! But it is a big resource hog on my machine so I’ve disabled it for now.

Many Thanks to all the people who have developed the software and plugins to make projects like this possible.