But... I'm not really a fan of the controller itself. A few of the buttons will get stuck (it's quite annoying to have square/triangle stick in God of War 2
). I mostly notice this with square, triangle, and L2 (light attack, heavy attack, magic attack, respectively) as those are the buttons used most often in God of War 2. I tried cleaning the buttons - no dice. I also don't like the AA batteries - they're heavy and add quite a bit of bulk to the back of the controller.This got me thinking...why wouldn't I try to squeeze the Logitech internals inside a standard Sony Dualshock 2 controller with a rechargeable battery? I actually do like the buttons on the standard PS2 controller (mostly because they don't get stuck
) and I like how the controller feels without the massive AAs on the back.To start off, here's a pic of the Logitech internals:
Looks like it could be a tight squeeze to fit this into a standard PS2 controller. But hey, I'm up for a challenge!
Next, I've done some current draw measurements to get an idea of what batteries I should be shooting for:
Searching for receiver: 26.7 mA
Connected and mashing buttons rapidly: 6.3 mA
Mashing buttons + rumble: 60-100 mA (depending on whether one or both motors were rumbling, this is difficult to measure exactly because rumble isn't constant)
This is a lot lower than I thought. Most of the time it'll be drawing 6.3mA as the rumble motors aren't vibrating that often.
With that in mind, on to battery selection! The smallest LiPo that Batteryspace sells is this one: http://www.batteryspace.com/polymerli-i ... arate.aspx At 6.0mm x 30mm x 50mm, it would certainly fit behind the circuit board as far as length and width goes, but there's not enough room for 6.0mm of depth (just by eyeballing it looking through my transparent blue controller). That battery is also 750 mAh, which, if both rumble motors were going 100% of the time, would last about 7.5 hours. But since you're not using your PS2 controller as a vibrator (at least I hope not), you'd get much longer runtimes than that. If you were to turn off vibration, it would last a whopping 119 hours on one charge. I don't know about you, but I never play any game for 5 days straight.
With fit issues in mind, I started looking around Batteryspace some more. I came across these: http://www.batteryspace.com/nimhrecharg ... 5x9mm.aspx They're 1.2v 320mAh NiMh button cells. Initially I thought a button cell wouldn't provide enough current, but after doing the above measurements, it actually would work fine. What's nice is that two of these (to get to 2.4v, which would power this controller just fine, it runs fine on NiMh AA rechargeables now) would fit in place of one of the vibrator motors.
I would get rid of the vibrator motor with the small rotating weight because it's not used as much and the one with the big rotating weight is what provides most of the vibration anyway. (TBH I'm not sure that I would even miss having vibration - I didn't miss it on my Wavebird when I had my Gamecube)A 320 mAh battery would last at least 5.5 hours (if I get rid of one vibrator motor the controller would use ~60 mAh whilst vibrating). That would be plenty of runtime for me. If I decide to go on a marathon gaming spree, I can turn off the vibration and get about 50 hours of play time.
Now, I've come into an interesting problem: how would I charge these NiMh button cells? Batteryspace's smallest NiMh smart charger states that it has to be used with at least 600 mAh batteries.
But there must be a way to charge these button cells; otherwise, why would they exist?Also, I know vibration doesn't matter that much to me - does anyone feel that vibration is really necessary? I could get much longer runtimes if I got rid of both vibrator motors.
