Arcade controller, Faemiyah style, r3m
After seeing Warma's awesome homemade arcade controller, I decided to make my own. As his motif was good, my version is practically a copy, except for one notable modification - I decided to mirror the button layout as compared to regular arcade controllers. I've always been bothered how you're supposed to do the movement with the left hand, when delicate operations are usually done on the right hand by right-handed people.
Hencefrom, the code r3m, for 'revision 3, mirrored'. The construction process is explained below, shitty image quality courtesy of an ancient Nokia phone.
Using same materials as Warma seemed like a good idea all the more when I had gotten his excess. The cover is made from 6.5mm plywood with a protective film on one side. The controller is made into a size of 480x240mm, which is slightly smaller than Warma's originals.
As I have no workshop, I had to attach the plywood onto my TV table with supports underneath. Suffice to say, after the operation the said table is in less-than-perfect shape. Doesn't matter, it was free (as in beer).
Button layout consists of two arc-shaped setups on either side of the central stick. They are designed to accomodate four human fingers in a neutral position. The setup ignores the little finger, human physique does not have a separate tendon for it anyway.
The X and down buttons are slightly larger (30mm as opposed to 24mm) than the rest because they're to be used with the thumb, which generally has less finesse than the other fingers. For people who wish not to use their thumbs, alternative layouting using just the top arc would be easy to make just by using the 7 buttons on the top, disregarding X. The holes for the arcade stick itself and the start/select/home buttons are 15mm in size.
Casing is made of simple 45x20mm wooden bar. The image on the left shows the glued-in bars in compression after all holes have already been drilled.
As the sawing had to be done manually, I had no reliable method of ensuring the exact length of the bars. Thus, I had to saw them into shape with slight tolerance, then grind them into exact measures. It still didn't come out exactly right though.
Getting the buttons took quite a while, so I actually left the controller lay idle for about two weeks. I got the PCB (chimpSMD) from Yankeeland rather early, but there was absolutely nothing to do with it until getting the other parts.
When I finally got a notification of a delivery from Germany, it was time to ensure the casing would hold. If the neighbors had somehow been patient with the sounds of drilling and grinding, pounding the nails into place at 10 in the evening meant they would probably have come to kick my ass had they been able to determine which apartment the noise was coming from. I actually went outside to punch the heads of the nails slightly inside the plywood. No need to push your luck.
After the nailing was done, it was time to attach all the controls. Unlike Warma's original revision, I colour-coded the buttons with the normal Playstation schema. The yellow buttons are L1 and R1 while the white ones are L2 and R2.
The movement button on/off switch required carving a matching hole to the front, which was by far the most tedious phase of the whole construction. It took me ages, and generated quite a lot of noise, but the neighbors were probably happy that at least the pounding had stopped. The stick is attached with four screws with conical heads, so they could be slightly impressed into the plywood.
I made the impressions with a 8mm drill over 4mm holes, but apparently wasn't gentle enough and there's slight damage to the film near the screw bases. Nevermind, the overall result looks kind of neat anyay. And this is a ghetto controller.
The buttons did not come with screw terminals, so the only way to go was to start soldering. Luckily, the connections had holes through which I could insert the heads of the wires. As I used 1.5mm^2 wiring throughout the system, it would probably not have been even necessary to use solder. The wires barely fit through the holes, I could just have covered the ends with tape and the connection would be persistent within its own pressure.
It turned out that my soldering iron is rather shitty, I just had forgotten this in the few years I had not used it. The soldering process took an immense amount of time, and for few connections, the result was just an ugly clump of solder that rather prevented the wire from moving back through the holes than connected it to them.
Despite being uglier than a land whale from Kallio, the end result seemed to work fine. I went through all buttons and stick directions (which I had to reconnect twice because the microswitch locations in relation to the metal connections were rather unintuitive), and they tested out just fine with a multimeter.
Adding the PCB was rather tedious, as the 1.5mm^2 wires did not fit into the screw terminals. I had to cut out some individual threads from each wire to make them fit, and my diagonal pliers were a bit too large for the task. Everything worked out in the end though, and it was time to test the thing.
It's actually surprising it was possible to fit anything within the casing. If there is one thing I learned in vocational school, it was that you should always leave a bit of excess wire. Unfortunately, I exaggerated greatly, so the first test was done with the casing open, the PCB hanging inside positioned so that it hopefully would not short out anywhere.
Being relatively confident with my abilities, I of course connected the controller directly into my PS3 without ever having checked that even the PCB would work. It worked perfectly, multimeters do not lie.
I made a gap for the USB cable and fixed it in place with an angled iron support, creating a rather... creative cable clamp. The cable exit hole is on the right side of the casing, as the excessive wiring hell would not allow the cable clamp and the gap to be placed at the center. I then closed the casing for some preliminary experimentation.
Testing the controller out in Soul Calibur 5, the layout indeed seems a bit more natural than the left-handed setup typical to regular arcade controllers. Of course, this being practically the first time I've used movement buttons as opposed to a pad or a normal left-handed stick, I got my ass handed to me even by offline opponents. Probably alleviable with practice.
All that's left is some smoothing of the edges and hiding the screw ends at the bottom. I won't go too far with the finishes though, as useless finery would detract from the ghetto aesthetics.
-Trilkk, 2012-06