Single joystick direction not working - 10" Picade

Hi all,

I’ve built my first Picade (10" edition) and I am very excited to get it up and running. Only issue is that I cannot for the life of me get the joystick to be recognised in RetroPie when pushing it to the right.

I’ve tried wiggling the cables a bit to make sure that they are properly seated, but nothing is working.

Any help would be appreciated!

Do own or have access to a multi-meter / ohm meter?

Just to be clear, when does it not work? I assume it’s when you try to assign it to ‘D-pad right’ during the Configure Input wizard. If that’s the case it’s most likely to be a physical problem. It sounds like you checked the wires. You should also check that the XHAT is pushed down onto the Pi sufficiently. If it’s not pushed down far enough, one or more of the pins might not make a connection.

Unfortunately, I do not :(

Yeah, its during the configuration wizard. I’ve pushed down on the XHAT to make sure thats properly seated, but again no luck.

There’s a very small chance that the XHAT driver didn’t install properly, so you could uninstall it and re-install it.

Did you download and install RetroPie on the sd card yourself, or are you using a pre-installed card? I ask because the pre-installed cards can sometimes cause weird problems.

Other than the above, it looks like a hardware issue - either the joystick, the cable, the XHAT or the Pi. Does the joystick feel and sound the same when pushed to the right as it does when pushed in the other three directions?

I installed RetroPie myself, but it is a weekly un-official release as I am working with a Raspberry Pi 4, so maybe thats the issue?

The joystick feels the same when pushed in any direction.

We can’t rule that out, but if everything else is working correctly (the other joystick directions and all the buttons) my guess is it’s hardware.

I recall seeing in the past a utility/script to show the status of the GPIO pins. When you pressed a button or moved the joystick, you’d see the relevant pin status changing. If you can find that and run it, you’ll be able to see if joystick right is opening/closing the circuit of the pin it’s on. I don’t recall where I saw it, maybe another forum user would know?

You could try this, you may have to install Raspbian on a spare SD card to try it though.
http://wiringpi.com/the-gpio-utility/pin-test/
The Xhat pinout is here to see what pin is what.

Thanks for the guidance so far.

I did reinstall the XHat drivers but no luck. In fact I lost some functionality in the other joystick directions, but I managed to get one other direction back after wiggling the joystick conntector a bit (which makes me think this is definitely a hardware problem). The joystick connector on the XHat board seems a bit loose itself, as I can wiggle it a bit side to side.

I used the wiringpi readall utility and I could see changes when I moved the joystick in the working directions, but no changes when moving it in the non-working directions.

This is the hardware issue. I don’t think you can do much about it. In this situation you can do one thing is you can connect with the support team. They can help you with an exact solution.

Regards,
Lewis

Thought I’d give an update on how this turned out. I ended getting a replacement joystick from Pimoroni, which unfortunately didn’t fix the issue, so I ended up getting a replacement Picade X HAT which did fix it.

Shout out to support for their quick response!