I‘ve always been curious about getting into DDR but my experience was limited to the time there was a soft ddr mat, an xbox and a crt on my high school classroom and some occasional arcade experience. Recently, a doctor told me that if I don’t exercise daily, I'm was gonna die*** so my solution to the problem was to buy or make a hard arcade style pad myself!
did a little bit of research on the options watching some informative but annoying youtuber style videos and ended up with making a FSR pad (force resisting sensors with plywood and polycarbonate kinda following this guide but making it full size.
I powertooled and bruteforced (also asked some stuff about the software in some discords) my way into it and these were the results!
The guide has the cost at around $190 but by sourcing the electronics and stuff from aliexpress, and locally I managed to get it down to $130-ish. If I eventually get good enough to need it, I'll add a handbar. A neat thing about the way it is right now is that it fits perfectly under my sofa!
The sensors need to have some space from the panels, so I just shoved incomplete crochet thingies in there and it worked perfectly. Some people use rubber or velcro, but yarn works just as well. That gave me the idea of eventually doing some arrow art out of crochet. It will look quite cute imo. gonna take a while to get my crochet skills up to the task, though. (getting the measurements right is kinda hard)
Had to rewire and adjust some stuff before it was fully working, but it ended up working pretty nicely with some rudimentary cable management. All the software stuff is pretty straight forward, just adding some code into an arduino and running some python things. Even a dummy like me can do it!
I've been enjoying it a ton for these last 2 weeks! The most played DDR version/clone on PC is called StepMania which is basically an open-source hugely customizable DDR with an overwhelming amount of user made content (some people also port all the DDR classic songs). I'm terrible at it currently, but I can feel myself getting the same level of enjoyment my broken brain feels trying to 1CC shoot 'em ups.
A while ago I talked about my intentiosn of building this pad on the rhythm games thread and @Nemoide was nice enough to direct me to a DDR/community for women and femme-leaning/identifying folks a friend of them runs! I'm on their server and I still don't understand a lot of the technical stuff they talk about, but I hope to eventually get to that level.
***might be exaggerating a lot here