How To: Raspberry Pi GPIO Buttons for RaceCapture

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EcotecMiata
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Joined: Thu Sep 14, 2017 3:03 am

How To: Raspberry Pi GPIO Buttons for RaceCapture

Post by EcotecMiata »

Demo Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4YTmlmBw5Q


This isn't very complicated, get RaceCapture working in Raspberry Pi First.

Go grab yourself the buttons that you will need 2 or 3 buttons:

Left, Right and "ESC" though Left and Right are really all you need. ESC just bring your back to the main Race Capture Menu.

This works:

https://learn.adafruit.com/retro-gaming ... spberry-pi

I intend to buy this and use it: https://learn.adafruit.com/retro-gaming ... spberry-pi (NOT TESTED YET)

For the purpose of testing this you don't need buttons, I used wires connected to the pins on my Raspberry Pi to fake a button when touched together as seen in video above.

Next follow the instructions here:

https://learn.adafruit.com/retro-gaming ... s-hardware (Scroll to the bottom where they start talking about GPIO pins)

RetroGamer takes GPIO inputs and converts them to keyboard presses. This will explain how to connect your button(s) and configure RetroGamer. Once configured you should be able to control RaceCapture without needing the touchscreen.

Connect your buttons to the GPIOs and make note of which ones you are using as we need to map those to keyboard presses.

In the above instructions you'll run "retrogame.sh" choose any of the menu options.

edit /boot/retrogame.cfg

You'll only need three entries, entries that start with a # sign are just comments.

Remember where you wrote down what GPIO pins you used in your setup for your buttons? That's what goes in the configuration file as a number, for example:

LEFT 18
RIGHT 21
ESC 16

The above means, when GPIO 18 has "contact" then "send a left button" etc.

It is very simple to get working.

Ask me any questions you might have, while I'm new to Raspberry Pi I've been using Linux for eons, and can walk anyone through most of this.

Cheers,

Paul

brentp
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Post by brentp »

This is great, Thanks! We'll make it sticky for a while.

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