zola | Fun with DDR!

I was playing DDR yesterday and one of the arrow keys on my dance pad got stuck!

Fortunately, we have two, so we swapped pads. After I quit, Keith and I started tearing apart the broken dance pad. Let me state first off that we have the really solid ones, the metal ones, because I had teenagers when we purchased the game and I knew they would be tough on it.

The design is astonishingly simple. There is a contact plate about the size of an index card wired into the main harness, padded with foam, with jumpers connecting the arrow plates to light up the LED indicators. The arrow plates themselves have some aluminum tape to touch the contact plate, that's on a thin foam backing.

Each "square" is lined up via triangular pieces of plywood in the corners, and it looks like all that had happened was that one of those got a bit shredded and was keeping the plate from springing back up.

Back of Dance Pad--it's covered by a non-skid, rubbery material.

Here's the back with most of the rubbery material peeled off

And here's the back with that board moved out of the way.

The front, of course.

The corner part, this is the "x" button corner

The wood triangles highlighted

The front with the metal holding pieces removed. These pieces are all quite light, so we weren't too worried about the weight of them on the wires. The white stuff is a foam material, it isn't as springy as it used to be, but when it compresses, the aluminum tape on the arrow makes contact with the board in the center. We're going to replace that with slightly thicker, sturdier foam. If making contact is a problem, we'll just raise the circuit board with a tiny bit of foam underneath, which will also protect it a little.

The area of detail--this is what a contact plate looks like. This is the one that was damaged, you can see the "bump" but you can also see why it still works--the circuit isn't really broken.

The back of the contact plate

The area of detail. It's hard to see, but I put a red arrow to highlight the small circle that is actually denting into the back of the board.

The back of the arrow piece--the silvery stuff is the aluminum tape. This is the mate to the damaged contact plate, and you can see where the "bump" tore the tape away.

Area of detail and close-up of the back of the arrow piece--the curvy line at the bottom is the wire and the LED lights.

We're going to refurbish it, it's definitely due. There was a manufacturing defect, we discovered, that is the real reason one of the plexiglass pieces has a crack in it--one of the screws that holds the plywood base wasn't socked down tightly. It's clearly been like that since the pad was manufactured, there is an indentation , not a crack, in the contact plate.

I can probably replace the plexiglass part quite inexpensively, I don't know if I can get the arrow to peel off the plexiglass, but even if I can't, I can buy the actual piece no trouble. The contact plate has minimal damage and I found copper tape for repairing the broken circuit--the contact plates are so big that the one small damaged spot hasn't caused any trouble, but we'll fix it while we have it apart.

We're going to replace the foam so the pad is nice and springy again, and probably replace the underlying piece of plywood with a slightly thicker piece so that the screws have a more solid base to bite into (this won't affect the height of the pad at all, we'll just use thinner backing on the part that goes on the floor).

This stuff is amazing--we could actually make a brand new board if we needed to!