Step Twenty: Connection to the Computer

Inside the control panel to my arcade cabinet, I have an IPAC 4 which has 56 inputs for keyboard commands, which will work great for the dance pad connections.

I wanted this to have a quick disconnect ability in case of wanting to move the pad or the cabinet so I used a cat 5 cable and wall plate.

 I did not want to make another hole in the panel, so I went to the local Radio Shack and purchased a cat 5 wall plate, and then mounted it on to a 1" thick piece of oak, that I cut to match the size of the wall plate, in one side I cut a 3/8" inch hole for the cat 5 cable to go through, then where the plate stuck out 3/4" for the connections behind the face of the plate, I cut a 2 1/4 inch hole through the wood piece.  Once this was done, I wired the wall plate to a short piece of cat 5 cable (which will be more than long enough to make it to the Ipac) and screwed the wood and wall plate to the control panel.

On the Ipac, I used the player 2 controls, since you would never use the dance pad and the 2 player controls at the same time, this should not cause a problem.  for the up/down/left/right of the dance pad, I wired those to the player 2 up/down/right/left on the Ipac, and the up left and up right on the dance pad went to player button 1/2. and obviously, the ground wire came around to the ground on the Ipac.   Once this was done.  All I had to do was plug in the cable to the wall plate and test the game pad. 

Then I went into the stepmania program and programmed each button for operation.