Futaba Controller to SNES

 
 

    The Idea is to have a wireless controller for my super nintendo so I may play (in my opinion) the best game ever created, Gradius III from across the room. I succeeded using my digital proportional radio control system, the Futaba T6EX radio, and an R617FS receiver. It is fast and I can perceive no latency or lag. It works by feeding the PWM coming out of each of the six channels of the receiver into the mBed. The mBed has 12 DigitalOut pins detected to each of the buttons of a super nintendo controller. Up, Down, Left, Right, A, B, X, Y, L, R, START, and SELECT. Each One of the Six channels controls Two buttons. For instance channel One is either UP or DOWN or OFF, but never both. With this set up this means you can never press both X and Y at the same time. So this is not a perfect controller for every game, but for Gradius III you only need Two buttons so It works great! When the PWM and Channel of a button is detected by the mBed the pin is set to GND thus setting the state of one of the 4021 Shift registers. The SNES uses Two 8-bit shift registers in series to produce a 16-bit packet. I think I bought the 4021 ICs from digi-key. I got SMDs by mistake so I needed a Breakout board for them that can be had from http://www.capitaladvanced.com/ . However, Todd Mory of www.techmor.com gave me some in the spirit of technological advancement. Please click on the links at the top of the page for pictures and the code. Every link, piece of code and clue that I used is within these pages so anyone interested may duplicate this project.

 

How to connect your Futaba Radio Control to your Super Nintendo