Copper Tape Button Board

[Atra]

I'm curious if anyone has suggestions on how to get proper placement for the copper tape when making a button circuit board. I'm a bit impatient and decided to try my hand at this project without the custom PCB, so far I've managed to get just about everything working using a multitude of forum posts and RetroPie setup guides, the only piece I'm uncertain about is making the button circuit board. I'm concerned with how tiny the conductive pads are on the ds lite membrane, and I'm worried about getting the copper tape in the right positions.

[wermy]

There hasn't been much interest in a guide for this so that's why it's been a lower priority for me, but here's a quick summary of what I did:

I covered the general area of where the buttons would be in strips of the copper tape, which wrapped over the top onto the back, so you have one continuous copper tape surface, essentially.
Then I put the board up against the faceplate without any buttons in, and marked with a sharpie the center of each of the button holes.
From there you can use a razor to carefully slice down the middle of where each button is, one side will be ground and one side will be the actual trace for that button.
If you're careful with how you lay it out you can even have all the button share a ground connection. Just cut away pieces until you're left with just the bits of copper that you need. I attached the actual wires that connect to the GPIO pinholes on the backside (which is why I had the copper tape wrap over onto the back).
Hope that makes sense!

[Holydohnut]

Hi Wermy! I'm interested in a guide for this! Just didn't want to sound pushy asking you if it was still something you were looking into! Would there be any chance of a couple of pictures of your board? Cheers!

[144TECH]

I'm curious if anyone has suggestions on how to get proper placement for the copper tape when making a button circuit board. I'm a bit impatient and decided to try my hand at this project without the custom PCB, so far I've managed to get just about everything working using a multitude of forum posts and RetroPie setup guides, the only piece I'm uncertain about is making the button circuit board. I'm concerned with how tiny the conductive pads are on the ds lite membrane, and I'm worried about getting the copper tape in the right positions.

Little roll copper-tape $10/15 + alot of work and trial and error.

Common ground 6 button pcb $10, hook it up and it works.

You decide, altough diy it is fun too but, don't reinvent the wheel you know
Also, copper gets dull after a few weeks and the keypresses will fail in the long run, unless you gold or silver plate everything wich is not worth it.
If you really decide to diy that stuff, just buy a glassfiber pcb plate with copper layer and print out the circuit, and get it on there with an iron and etch it, but the work isn't worth it versus a button pcb wich is 10 bucks (ebay)

Greets 144Tech

[Helder]

144Tech you always answering things when you're not really reading what people are asking, this is for the mintyPi not the GBZ. If there are $10 plain pcbs on ebay for this I'd like to see since no one besides Wermy and myself have plain PCBs available and I'd like to see if someone copied the boards.