The wiring up starts....

So the buttons have been wired up now. Next will be the rotary, instead of resistors and transistors to make it work, we may be looking at a 2nd chip to do the job instead.

Rotary switch test board

You will need volume to hear the clicking, but below is a demonstration of a rotary switch, wired to the  chip via various wires and then wired to the LED's representing the D-pad.

The Chip is then programmed on each rotary position to light up the LED's in a preset order. You can also skip past Rotary positions without triggering that sequence.

How the electronics are coming along...

We have made many steps now including;

* Working Rotary on a test bed doing a sequence of LED blinks based on rotary selection

and now also got it to talk to the xbox and when a selection is made do the required sequence.

Should have video's shortly of it and testing on the xbox itself. I'll then get a more in depth technical blog from the guy doing the work.

Part 2 ... electronics

Now the following Blog Posts after this will be info passed to me and wont be my images, but I thought I could start. The xbox board itself will need wires wired in to each pad (D-pad and Buttons), ive sent the wheel off today with all the buttons ready to be soldered up. The board had already been sent off and heres the first image of the soldering, more will appear over the next few days as the pads are all soldered, buttons connected and chip put in.from the test bed.

Electronics Proof of concept

So the man in the know to electonics has it on a test bed. The below video shows the chip programmed for basic commands(at the moment F1 2011 commands are unknown)

So the switch on the left is the equivilant of twisting the rotary to different positions, so 4 points...bit like the 4 tyre selections and the LED's represent the D-pad. As you can see changing one switch then does a required pattern.

Completed Wheel (physically

Below is a pic of the completed wheel, the blue,red,green,yellow will correspond to the buttons ABXY. The 4 buttons at the top are to use as a normal Dpad for menu navigation. And the rotarys will be for the fuel and tyre selections.

Im going to wrap the gear paddles in carbon fibre as well to give them the completed look to go with the wheel, I will only wrap the top half as to not effect how they work as they can be tempremental as it is!

Button test placement

The piece isnt as strong as id like but it will do I may use some Araldite on the back once moulded to brace and strengthen where I can. (if the back looks ugly it doesnt matter you dont see that bit although i will keep as neat as possible)
So button placement it was always going to be tricky as im not removing the old wheel structure from behind, this is to keep the strength, ive got X,Y,B,A on there and the 2 rotarys for the programmed options, the xbox button, start, select will be in the centre as normal. So.....

The D-pad - you need these for the menu options and I was going to use 4 of the smaller buttons as the options, I just need to decide where to put them now.