Wanna play clon but don’t have a Raphnet adapter?
Got an arduino and some soldering
equipment? You came to the right place!
You’ll need:
- a Wii Guitar Hero controller (support for more will come in the future)
- Screw drivers (T10 and a small phillips should suffice for most guitars)
- an Arduino Pro Micro or Leonardo (3.3v or 5v, doesn’t matter)
- A long USB-Micro to USB-A cable (you probably have one laying around)
- A computer (duh)
- The Arduino IDE software
- The sketch and the Joystick library by MHeroinimus
We’ll be using a Wii GHWT guitar for example.
First, take apart the guitar body.
Take off the neck and faceplate, and undo all the screws till it’s open. Sometimes the screws
are on the front behind the faceplate depending on the model. Les Pauls, GHWT and GH5
guitars have this.
There’s also a screw behind the Warranty sticker. Remove it
and feel an immense amount of euphoric joy from
voiding your non-existent warranty.
Next, find the board with everything wired to it (usually in the center with the strum switches
soldered to it), unscrew it, and start desoldering everything from it other than the strum
switches, and the nunchuck cable (it’s a pain in the ass to do those anyway).
Now, hook up all the components according to this diagram:
There are a few components to leave out, like the weird phone line port, the xbox headset
connecter thing, etc. Leave them out of the guitar body. We’ll use the hole left over to run the
cable.
It should look something like this when you’re done.
Yeh it’s a different guitar. I didn’t document the making of, and don’t have the spare resources to make another one. Soz
Now, plug in the USB cable into
the arduino. Find a way to run the
cable out of the guitar that
prevents it from being
disconnected.
Tying a knot in the phone jack mount
is a great place to do this.
Plug the other end of the USB into
your computer, and we’ll upload the
code to it.
Download everything listed at the top, and extract it to folders on your desktop.
We’re gonna first install the joystick library. Open the Arduino IDE folder, and the Arduino
Joystick library folder. Drag and drop the “Joystick” folder into the libraries folder.
Aaaaand delete the desktop’s joystick library
folder.
Open arduino.exe
You should see this:
Don’t worry, no coding for today. Go to File>Open…
Navigate to the Generic_arduinotar
folder on your Desktop, and select
the
“Generic_arduinotar.ino”
file.
It should open another window with the code.
Go to Tools>Board: and select “Arduino Leonardo” if it isn’t already selected.
Then, go to Port to select the correct COM port.
Finally, go to Sketch>Upload.
The guitar should be working now! Just to make sure
it’s fully functional, go to the start menu, type joy.cpl,
and hit enter.
This boye should pop up. Hit the “properties” button.
GRYBO are buttons 12345, strum up and down is
6&7, and start and select is 8&9. Whammy is the X
axis. The joystick isn’t supported by the code yet, but
will be once I get off my lazy ass.
(or if someone else did it
thanks in advance)
Once everything seems functional, put it all back
together, and you’re done!
Go to Clone Hero, hit space, and configure the controller like a Raphnet guitar.
It should be the same performance as an Xplorer. With some work, I can hopefully make the
process much simpler, as well as make it perform as well as a Raphnet equipped guitar at a
quarter of the cost!
Thanks for reading!
- PixelGH
