Lets design and produce a Shoryuken Joystick Chasis?

Tech Talk
#1

Hi guys, long time lurker first time poster here.

I’m just about finished making my own custom stick with a wooden frame and plexiglass button board, but the build quality isn’t quite what I expected. I’m no carpenter so the frame isn’t perfect and the button board is a little on the thin side (so I could use snap in buttons) and it flexes a little under pressure. All in all it’s usable but I want better, before I get in to my actual proposal I’ll give a little of my background first:

I work for a large industrial company in the defense sector. Since we make weapons for the army, navy and airforce we’re constantly trying to improve our public image through various charity work. Since I work within the Procurement department I have easy access to suppliers who could give us a good price on materials, and the company itself has skilled sheet metal workers (and machines with that can produce military quality goods!) and welders that can turn sheets of steel in to vessels that can withstand massive pressure.

With this in mind, I figured I can do better than a few planks of wood nailed to a piece of plastic! So here’s my proposal.

With a little help from the SRK community, I would like to design and fabricate a short run of joystick chasis’, no sticks/buttons, controller boards/padhacks. Just plain chasis that you can buy your own parts for and paint as you’d like.

Since the easiest way for me to get people at my company involved is by making this charity work, I’ll distribute them for the price of materials plus a small mark-up to charity. Say $10-20 to Childsplay?

Before I go ahead and start organising this though, I guess the real question is how interested are people in buying something like this? The more people who are interested the cheaper the boards will become to make so I guess a bare minimum for a first run would be say 10 chasis.

Secondly, I’m in no way a custom stick guru. It would be much appreciated if more experienced members of the community could help design the chasis. I guess an important factor in this is creating a product that easily modable so a variety of sticks/buttons/controller boards/padhacks can be used. In addition to this request for help, I guess it would be useful for the more artistically skilled members of the community to put together some sketches of what they would like the finished stick to look like (though try to keep it relatively basic, rounded edges/chasis in the shape of the letters “SRK”/etc while cool would take considerable time to fabricate that my company may consider outside the scope of charity work).

Finally, if enough people are interested and we can bash our heads together enough to come up with a design everybody likes. I’ll fund and organise the project and then forward the finished products on to a “trusted” member of the community who can manage the sales and processing the donations to our chosen charity. (Eg. An SRK site admin since I’m just a random guy who could be out to rip people off. I know you all trust me already, I just want quality stick of my own! But I’d rather not have this project stall because people think it will turn in to some kind of a scam).

Anyway, there’s my suggestion. What do you guys think?

#2

Interesting proposition, especially if we can get a good design for the same price or better than the old QCF cases.

#3

Thanks for voicing your support.

In all honesty I have little idea how much it would cost at the moment, but I can’t imagine it to be too much. The first link on google for a 1000mmx1000mmx1.2mm sheet of alluminium costs around £25 (approx $35) if you buy it in single sheets, I imagine our buying power would get it significantly cheaper than that (25-50% cheaper) and assuming a 1 metre square is enough for 2 sticks, you’re talking about $10-15 for the metal. I guess we’d look towards coating the interior with some kind of non-conductive coating to stop ballshock should the thing short out. Then some rubber sheeting for the underside and various nuts/bolts as required. So hopefully we’ll be able to keep the cost to $20-25 per case, with a $10 markup for charity I guess we’d be looking at $30-35.

That said I pulled those numbers out of the air since we don’t have a design at the moment.

#4

Bumping for the good of the SRK community. What I see is general bickering between:

  • Size of stick (height, width). This is somewhat important since Korean and Happ parts don’t always fit into Sanwa/Seimitsu setups
  • Button layout(s). I’m a fan of 8 with Vewlix or TE layout. Plenty like the Astro/Blast city.
  • Neutrik or not

My favorite sizes tend to be MadCatz, Souji’s more recent 8 button layouts and Voltech (on order for a VSHG). A complete template someone could download and build at home would be pretty nice.

#5

I’m not sure what you mean by stick size? do some require much larger bore holes than others? The intention of this is to provide a barebones chasis. You can choose the actual stick yourself.

For the face panel I guess we could come up with a couple of designs. I’m not sure how the sheet workers would process it, but I assume it would be crafted using simple machiery rather than use any of our expensive plasma cutters or such. So it would probably be simply a case of marking half up in one layout and marking up the others.

As for the overall size/shape I guess it would have to be large enough to house the most common set ups and provide the hand support people would want, while at the same time being as minimal and compact as possible.

#6

Hey another reader not so much contributor here.

I think what he means is particularly in height the internal parts of Euro/American sticks are much bulkier and need a lot more room than the, nowadays more standard, Japanese parts.

As far as I know the shaft hole size is the same(I think that’s what you asked)

I think he’s concern was the community people who prefer Japanese vs other stick styles not agreeing on the dimensions of the cases

Edit: for comparison sake

Image source: slagcoin.com

The Japanese parts make it possible to fabricate a much slimer case

#7

HAPP sticks are bloody huge and won’t fit in a lot of standard cases, like SEs and that.

#8

Aside from having different mounting brackets, different models of joystick take up different amounts of space. For example, Happ parts are much larger vertically than Sanwa or Seimitsu ones. Buttons are different sizes as well.
Pictures / Data

I recommend designing the case to house a Sanwa JLF and six 30mm Sanwa / Seimitsu buttons on the top face, with either 3 (start/select/home) or 5 (start/select/home/L1/L2) 24mm holes on the sides of the case.

In particular, I’d put two holes on the left side of the case, two on the right side (symmetry), and one on the far edge (where the cable would come out). As for the face layout, I recommend a 6-button Vewlix style. Others may recommend eight face buttons (add L1/L2 holes to the face).

#9

Sanwa/Seimitsu would be a good start. Getting Happ/iL parts to fit would be a nice bonus though.

At this point I suggest that this should be a collaborative endeavour. Since ChrisJordan82 can likely get the parts, all we need is someone to do the design. Heck, I’ll chip in and see if I can come up with a decent top panel design for anyone who simply wants to get the case and put parts in without need for further customization.

As for price, for wood, the target should be $60 or less to make it competitive with the acrylic cases: Arthongs TEK-CASE and Bencao’s Project Fatality. For metal we can aim a bit higher, just don’t go above $130 unless you can powder coat to compete with Voltech’s VAS-HG Lite.

#10

He already address part of the pricing in #3, which would actually be impressive if they could be marketed at those prices quoted by him.

#11

What machines do you have at your workplace?

#12

I think the main point here is that we aren’t paying for manhours, or at least aren’t atm (I doubt i’d be able to get work to make 100 for charity lol, I’m going to try and sell the idea as practice work for our apprentices). That said, if we’d be providing a highish quality chasis for what amounts to an extremely cheap material cost, then perhaps we could increase how much we donate to charity to make the overall price more reasonable. Hell, if worst comes to worst and demand far out stretches what we can supply then perhaps could consider a charity auction for them at a gaming event?

#13

I want 6 buttons layout for jlf or ls32
built in stands for cthulhu pcb
square spot for neutrik adapters
very thick for the weight

#14

I’m not expert, but we put these in the water Astute class submarine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and have a land systems branch on the same site that manufactures a number of artillery devices.

We do subcontract a lot of parts to other companies across the country, but we hae a lot of machinery we essentially craft the entire hull on site.

#15

Please see if you have a good CNC-machine.

#16

I know we have CNC machines, I guess the real question is do we have any for small scale work (We have huge automated plasma cutters that work on 20m+ sheets of steel). Good question though, I’ll see if we have anything of a more appropiate scale for this project.

#17

This is a really interesting idea, maybe you could do a poll to find out what is most popular (layout, jap/us parts etc) and just produce a case to fit that. Either that or some of the more experienced tech talk people could take over the design bits (well volunteered d3v! lol), I trust them to know what would work and be popular.

Edit:BTW Chris, are you in the UK?

#18

Yah, I’m from Barrow-in-Furness. Just across the bay from Lancaster/Morcambe

#19

I don’t know what I could do to help, but I am very interested in doing this. If you need help assembling these chassis into complete sticks for that auction idea, I would be down to put in the man hours and the skill to assemble and complete them. I couldn’t do 100, but you could put me down to complete 15 of them.

One idea might be a wire path or something of the sort to keep the wiring clean when assembled. Meaning you could have two posts that have something screwed on top to contain the wires in various areas, or just offsets to zip-tie to. These place strategically to keep the wiring efficient and clean.

I agree with what lacker said, 6 or 8 button layout is up in the air. I would say 6, but some people like the Viewlix 8 because they can get close to the OG SF2 cab layout.

I have to go, I’ll check this thread later and see if I can think of anything useful. Great idea man!

-Jeremy

#20

On the subject of 6 or 8 buttons we could just go with 8 since you can buy covers for the unused slots if you’re uninterested in actually having the 2 extra buttons. Blank Arcade Pushbutton plugs - Gremlin Solutions.

I guess it wouldn’t be quite as pretty as a specifically designed 6 slot layout, but you’d have the option should you want/need to start using 8 buttons.

The alternative approach is that we have a few choices of button layout decided by a vote to get an idea of which type people actually want. That said, the entire fabrication process is unknown at the moment, so will depend on how easily we can switch between layouts.