New Picade Left Volume Buttons

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

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.

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

You may have to sudo apt install python-serial