Picade X Hat: additional buttons

Picade
1

Hi,
I have the first version of the Picade cabinet that came with the old Picade HAT but I upgraded it to a recent Pi 4 and the new Picade X Hat. The old cabinet had 2 additional buttons (for volume) that are not in the more recent, smaller version (i.e., 12 buttons instead of 10). Can I somehow wire them all to the Picade X Hat and use the additional two? If so, how? Thanks!

2

Button 7 and 8 on Hack Header maybe?

3

Interesting suggestions! Does anyone have experience with connecting and configuring these buttons? It seems we need to disable the UART to re-assign them as GPIO… I’ll check the code of the driver but if someone has already done it, that would be helpful.

4

I think those are the pins that can also be used for Plasma.
I don’t own a Picade, just so you know. ;)
There is some Picade stuff in the learn section.
https://learn.pimoroni.com/?term=picade

5

I managed to make it work with some editing of the picade.dts overlay, the buttons are mapped to keys. The only question I have left is if it is easily possible to map these keys to volume up/down (as in the original picade)? Any idea? Thanks.

6

That I don’t know. I don’t game on my Pi and have never used RetroPie etc.

7

Hi,

Did you do this with an RPi4? I managed to get Button 7 to map and work OK using this method, but button 8 doesn’t seem to work properly.

Cheers
Simon

8

Yes I got both buttons to work on a RPi4. Let me know if you need help.

9

Thanks, interesting. These are the steps I took so far.

I modified the picade.dts file to include

                            button7: button7 {
                                    label = "Button 7";
                                    linux,code = <78>;
                                    gpios = <&gpio 15 1>;
                            };

                            button8: button8 {
                                    label = "Button 8";
                                    linux,code = <74>;
                                    gpios = <&gpio 14 1>;
                            };

and also

            button7 = <&button7>,"linux,code:0";
            button8 = <&button8>,"linux,code:0";

The did sudo ./install.sh

Rebooted, then Button 7 works, but Button 8 does nothing and then after a while, puts out some characters without the button being pressed (’-’ character in this case).

I tried disabling Serial as suggested by alphanumeric in a different thread, but that didn’t make a difference. Also tried a vanilla install of Raspian which did the same.

Did I miss anything?

10

Fixed it. The missing part of the puzzle was specifying the pins in the dts file.

brcm,pins = <5 6 8 9 10 11 12 14 15 16 20 22 23 24 25 27>;

11

I have added similar code to picade.dts:

			button7: button7 {
				label = "Button 7";
				linux,code = <114>;
				gpios = <&gpio 14 1>;
			};

			button8: button8 {
				label = "Button 8";
				linux,code = <115>;
				gpios = <&gpio 15 1>;
			};

and

	button7 = <&button7>,"linux,code:0";
	button8 = <&button8>,"linux,code:0";

then

	cd Pimoroni/picade/picade-hat/
	sudo make all install

then rebooted and it works. I use triggerhappy to control the volume.

12

Yes there are also the pins there, good that you made it work.