Red – Power: Many sites label this as 5V, and while this may be true for Play Station 1 controllers, we found several wireless brands that would only work at 3.3V.

When the motors are first engaged, almost 500mA is drawn on this line, and at steady state full power, ~300mA is drawn.

Grey – Vibration Motors Power: 6-9V? With no controller connected, this meausures about 7.9V, with a controller, 7.6V, most websites say this is 9V (except playstation.txt -> 7.6V), although it will still drive the motors down around 4V, although somewhat slower.

Orange – Command: PlayStation -> Controller.

(A pull-up resistor is needed because the controller can only connect this line to ground it can’t actually put voltage on the line). This is an open collector output and requires a pull-up resistor (1 to 10k, maybe more).

Brown – Data: Controller -> PlayStation.

To operate vibration motors, motor_power is also needed. Wire Colors and Functionality: There are 9 wires, 6 wires are needed at a minimum to talk to the controller: (clock, data, command, power & ground, attention). You’ll need a programmer (PICKIT2) and ‘s free IDE, MPLAB.

MPLAB projects (c code) for PIC18f4550 to control a PS2.

Recorded Command and Response between real PlayStation and Controller during first connect.

Example Commands necessary to read all analog (joysticks and pressures) and control motors.

Complete Command listing and explanations.

Button Mappings for PS2 Dual Shock controller and Guitar Hero controller.

high level: packet descriptions / protocol.

Low Level: how individual bytes are transfered.

Hardware Interface / Wiring Connections.

Update: Check out the arduino ps2 library that Bill Porter helped polish. The goal here is to consolidate the information and make it as fast as possible to get up and running.

Intro: There are all sorts of guides that explain how to interface a PS2 controller already out there.

Playstation 2 serial number lookup