New Picade Left Volume Buttons

Support
1

I just purchased and assembled a Picade which is being run by a Raspberry Pi 3 B.

I really love it, it has a very satisfying look and feel, and could even be assembled by a relative noob such as myself.

One problem/question: I cannot map the two left hand side buttons to the joystick. Initially I thought I had done something wrong with my install, but then I realized that they control volume. Since I can control the volume through the RetroPie software, is there any way that I can use these two buttons in the joystick controls?

I have looked online, but can’t find any solutions which don’t involve rewriting parts of the operating system, which is a length I am not willing to go to. I feel that I am just about competent in Linux to rewrite a config file.

Can you give me any help?

Thanks

               Jason
2

They control the gain of the amplifier on the Picade directly, rather than system volume.

If you switch over to the newer Picade firmware you can rebind them: New 2.x Configurable Keyboard/Gamepad Firmware

The binding setup is a little cryptic, but once you figure it out you’ll be able to rebind everything to your heart’s content.

3

I got up the courage to update the Firmware. That went off without a hitch.

I then wrote a Python sketch called TestBind.py

import serial
picade = serial.Serial(‘/dev/ttyACM0’,9600,timeout=1.0)
picade.write(“a 218 217 216 215 128 130 32 129 122 120 115 99 176 177 117 100 105 111 112”)
print(picade.readline().strip())

According to the instructions given here:

I got an error message saying that there was no library called “serial”

I executed the program by typing “python3 TestBind.py” from a LINUX prompt.

Do I need to load the serial library from something, or am I just not running things correctly.

                   Jason
4

You may have to sudo apt install python-serial