Hardware Input Pinouts

[gudenau]

I would like to know where I could read the circlepad and the buttons from a 3DS, so that I could record them on a PC for video use. With the extra space from the "tall" screen, that would be a great thing to fill it in with.

 

[FAST6191]

So you have a 3ds modded for recording footage and want to also grab keypresses a la some emulators to play back on top of the footage gathered.

You have two options as I see it.

1) Some variation on the non mechanical automated button pressing tools ( http://gbatemp.net/threads/3ds-xl-d-pad-pinout.362406/ ). Here I would look at the test points on the 3ds motherboard and tap those, feed them to something like a teensy++ and pipe it into a computer as a keyboard* or something. From there you should be able to make a script to overlay subtitles or pictures for the appropriate times. Bonus is you could probably also have it cut the other way and make an automated button pressing option at the same time.

*owing to the nature of keyboards on modern computers (repeat rates, accidental detection and the like) it might not be ideal to use this model for action heavy games. If you are emulating the pad then you will probably have to analyse some analog stuff as well so you will probably also be doing it the hard way.

2) Wait a couple of months as people tear into the 3ds firmware. With it running in the background there is serious scope for cheats and debugging type activities, with it also being a network device you can probably pipe button presses to something and capture them accordingly. This probably will require a 4.5 3ds though.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

I would like to know where I could read the circlepad and the buttons from a 3DS, so that I could record them on a PC for video use. With the extra space from the "tall" screen, that would be a great thing to fill it in with.

I'm not aware of anyone doing a complete pinout description, I've looked for one several times.
However, https://github.com/dekuNukem/3xtDS/blob/master/overview.pdf explains how to solder to the circle pad, and in the motherboard picture there, you can see where all the button wires are soldered, so that should make it easier.

By the way, in case you're not aware, you can also send touch screen input (although that is the trickiest part), there's code available that can control all of the 3DS' inputs (minus IR and accelerometers), which was designed for Twitch Plays Pokemon:
https://github.com/dekuNukem/3xtDS/blob/master/

 

[gudenau]

Thants for the input. (Pun intended)