Create My Own Frets On Fire Controller

Want to play your Frets on Fire games with your own controller?
Here is the tutorial, how to Hacking a toy guitar to make a "Frets on Fire" controller

I started with an old USB keyboard (a PS2 type would have worked too). The advantage of the USB keyboard (soon to be a guitar) is that I can have it plugged in at the same time as my normal keyboard.Keyboard separated into its halves. The controller is the small circuit board in the top right corner.

This is a close up of the USB keyboard controller, note that the membranes forming the key contacts are not soldered. to the controller but are pressed against the PCB using a metal bracket (not shown) which has been removed.

This is the reverse view of USB keyboard controller PCB. Note the black areas for the membrane contacts, I used a fine sandpaper to remove the black conductive material until the copper traces were shiny then tinned them with a soldering iron. Now was a good time to look at the membrane contacts and traces to make a list of which keys go to which PCB traces. There was an important consideration in picking the guitar fret keys. In order to maximize the number of fret keys I can press simultaneously it was important to pick keys that do not share a common column line. For example on my keyboard the QWE keys have a common row and three distinct column lines but the ASD keys share the column lines with the QWE keys so they are not a good candidate for fret keys.
I ended up picking QWE and FGH, each group o f keys has a distinct row line and all six keys have distinct column lines. It is therefore possible to press any of the keys in any simultaneous combinations. Also I avoided keys that share a column or row with the ENTER key which was to become the guitar pick.

This is the toy guitar I chose to use, I bought it new for $20. It has all the fret buttons I needed,
it has a pick and a bunch of other buttons I planned to use for arrow keys and escape key.
Note that it has a functional whammy bar which may come in handy if FoF decides to support such a feature.
This is the key layout I decided to use, frets F1 through F5, Up, Down, Left, Right buttons as well as the Enter and Escape key. This would allow easy navigation in the game without having to touch the keyboard.

The first step was to break the toy guitar apart and remove its controller and speaker, I left all the button PCBs in place including their original wires. The fret PCB had the 8 buttons in a 3x3 matrix configuration which was unsuitable given the special requirements outline d above regarding key independence of the USB controller. I ended up performing some PCB surgery cutting some traces and soldering additional wires to split up the matrix into three groups of three keys.

The USB controller is now soldered to all the guitar keys I planned to use. I cut a notch into the edge of each half of the guitar case to allow the USB cable to exit from the side.

And this is the finished product, ready to play. Note that I rearranged the fret colors to sort of match the order of the colors used in the game

taken from : http://www.craxor.com/foftar/