Prototype 2 Pc Controller

[Domenec Reynolds]

FinallyHere comes my strategy to control the flipdot display. This is the control board prototype, and drives ONE display. Each display will have it's own control board and can be daisy chained (ie, only one micro controller needed and it will control all the displays stacked together.

It's still a prototype as I'm not sure it will work (it would be too good if it worked at first try). Also I still have to design the power supply for the board logic chips. For now I'm using a cheap eBay switching voltage regulator to provide 3.3V or 5V to the ICs from the 24V supply, but this will be integrated in the design in the final version. The ESP32 being 3.3V and the chips on the display being 5V, I'll have to do some level shifting in the final design (I keep this for later once I'm sure it works).

Joysticks were first used as controls for aircraft in the early 1900s. In the late 60s Sega introduced a two way joystick. By 1973, a four way joystick was released by Taito as part of an arcade racing game! The classic Atari joystick with a single button wasn't released until 1977. Shortly afterward in the mid 80s, Nintendo's d-pad became the standard game controller!

How does playing the same game with different controller types change the experience of the game? What other ways could you alter the size, materials, and locations of inputs to make a diverse controller?

Follow this design cycle to create your invention. Test your idea with others and share your divergent controllers with us on social media! (Make sure to ask for parent permission if you are under 18.)

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On October 12 I decided to test if the industrial market would be interested in a new concept to substitute the now ageing Programmable Logic Controller or PLC. Why not put an app store on top of a PLC and let apps define its functionality? The new concept was called App Logic Controller or ALC. Almost 6000 page views, hundreds of likes and one month and a bit later, I am happy to announce that you see me holding in my hand the first prototype. Now let's be clear. This is not yet an ALC which I would put into an industrial machine that can kill people. This is a Raspberry Pi powered device in the same housing and with similar connectors as you would expect in a normal PLC. Via our open source app-enabled operating system, Snappy Ubuntu Core, any developer will be able to create "industrial Snaps", [see snapcraft.io for how]. These Snaps can then be sold via your own Brand Store. Yes you heard it correctly. You run your own industrial App Store and decide what goes into it after you have thoroughly tested all snaps. But you don't have to create your own ecosystem. Others can come and provide you with snaps that you can resell.

Before I wrote the blog post I did not know that UniPi.Technology existed and that they just released the RaspberryPi powered Neuron. But the advantage of writing a blog post is that people reach out to you with crazy ideas like "Why not just make it happen!". I also signed an NDA with another lot bigger company. Let's see if in 2017 we can make further announcements. For the moment I wanted to make sure that every industrial programmer knows what they want for Christmas! Snaps / Apps as a way to programme logic controllers makes a lot of sense because one innovator can now sell their innovations to millions of customers via an app store. Let's see who becomes the first Industrial Snap Millionaire.

So now the concept is real. Why not start a competition? We will be demoing the Snap-enabled Neuron connected to an equal Snap-Enabled Industrial Dell IoT Edge Gateway at Mobile World Congress at the end of February. Any developer that creates an industrial Snap that surprises us for the Neuron and/or the Dell Edge Gateway and puts it into the Snap Store, can have us demo it on Mobile World Congress.

Any industrial company that wants to know more about ALCs and how the secure open source app-enabled operating system Ubuntu Core can help them create new revenues in 2017, should just download Ubuntu Core and afterwards reach out to us if they want to collaborate on designing production-ready solutions.

Your controller would become stateful: it has a state (allMessages) that can't be shared between two requests. The controller is not thread-safe anymore. If it was called concurrently to handle two concurrent requests, there might be a race condition.

Or you could do the right thing and make the code stateless, in which case creating a new controller for each request would be useless, since the controller would be stateless and thus thread-safe. The scope could then keep its default value: singleton.

If you use singleton you must ensure that you do not hold state in your controller or that any state you do hold is designed to be shared between invocations. Usually business service components are built this way and are safe to inject into a singleton controller.

I have taken apart and refurbished well over 100 ColecoVision standard controllers and had never saw boards with the spinner components on them until I came across these 2 about a month back. They where from a craigslist purchase. There was no difference in the controller housings, and I didn't notice the until I took the second controller apart. These 2 PCBs are the only ones I have ever saw that have the spinner components soldered in place along with an extra 2 diodes. Here are some pictures. Note that the board to the left of the ones with the spinner components that has the location marked,this is quite common. There are many different boards and many don't even have markings for placement of the spinner components. I also have a Super Action Controller PCB and spinner knob posted for reference. Note that the standard controller components are horizontal and the SAC are vertical. These boards are as found. All I did was remove them from the controller housings. Note the double-sided tape under the components.

The controllers housing these came out of were no different than any others, the pcbs just have the spinner components soldered in place. I believe I saw a photo of a proto controller with the spinner above the keypad somewhere. My guess is that the magnets in the spinner knob would be mounted differently so that it would spin horizontal. There wouldn't be enough room for it to be vertical.

My girlfriend thinks I should refurbish these 2 boards and put them in controllers with ball knobs. I told her, that you wouldn't be able to tell they had the spinner components on them when assembled, and she said she realized that, but still thinks it would be cool.

I *think* I've got a few of these with components in them (99% sure, would have to look again to be positive, but not really worth taking apart a bunch of controllers to me! lol). I don't think there's anything 'special' about them, just early revisions of the board. Coleco probably had the next production run made without the components to save money. Someone may be willing to spend more on them, but to me, they're just another varied revision of the Coleco Controller board.

Likewise, it's interesting to note that the one with the components, the connections for the cable appear to be different. More of the slide on contact variety vs. through hole solder like the empty silk screened PCB variant. I noticed on the latter (at least on mine) that Violet and White are not being used, and my guess is that has to do with the additional signal needed for the spinner. So If someone wanted to add a spinner to these, you'd need a cable with all 9 lines.

I have been playing space games, like Starmade, which allow a pilot to have control over all 6 axis of ship control, 3 axis of rotation and 3 axis of throttle. (in starmade rotation is "stabilized" so the ship only moves while you push the stick,, some games rotation is inertial, while in starmade vector is inertial).

I tried to make my own sketch, but never figured out how to use the library correctly and had too many problems, so I went with modify the sketch provided, and it worked the first try, nice and smooth, very good.

I used an arduino pro-nano v3 (old bootloader) because it had 8 analog inputs but I wish it had more digital inputs because I could be happy hooking up more buttons,,,, HOWEVER< ,, I actually don't even use all of the buttons I DID hook up, so no ACTUAL trouble there. It's just that there are buttons under the sticks, so I wanted to hook some up, but while the pro-nano is connected to USB, if you put buttons there, it boggles up the usb connection.

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