I have decided that I plan on spending the first part of my summer working on a project I have been wanting to complete for a while: making a bluetooth controller. I already have most of what I need (battery and charging board, tactile switches, 3D printer) so I figured now would be a good time to finish it.

I spent the last few days modeling a D-Pad and ABXY diamond and plan to use a tactile switch matrix like the one shown below to "talk" with the raspberry pi.


Ignore the crappy soldering
Currently, the buttons are fitted to the pad with a pin that is pressure fitted. The plan is to use Retrogame and have each of the switches be wired to a GPIO pin.

I'll add a link to the 3D models once I have made more work!

This looks like a pretty neat project! What other buttons (if any) do you plan on adding? Will it be a standard Xbox/PlayStation style, or something more retro?

Cool, I made an tiny dual axis style gamepad out of a teensy once but it was wired. I always wanted to look at a BT option but never did.

I will be very interested to see how you go with your project .

The plan is to add L/R buttons as well as Start Select Buttons along with one more that will maybe be open to set to whatever I want such as a macro or something along those lines. I don't have any joycons but a ton of excess tactile switches (about 50) nor do I know much how to program joysticks but I could definitely learn in the future so this controller will definitely be more of a retro controller style.

Quick little update.

I decided that the easiest design I could go for with the shell would be something similar to a Wiimote. I included a side-by-side comparison between the controller and a Wiimote for reference.

Please note that I broke one of the pegs for a button so there really should be a fourth one I am just too lazy to re-print another. Here's the front and back of the current version.


P.S. Anyone know how to make the pictures show a little smaller? It keeps annoying me that they are so large.

Good progress so far, keep it up!

Imgur can resize images by either you looking through the app to find the resize options (on the desktop version the size options are on the bottom right of the image view window) or you can edit the link yourself. Just add a letter before the file extension name.

For example, here's your original link:
https://i.imgur.com/9Y5qtWw.jpg

For a small image you would add an s
https://i.imgur.com/9Y5qtWws.jpg


Medium is the same way but you use a m instead of a s
https://i.imgur.com/9Y5qtWwm.jpg


Here's a list of all the letters you can use:
s = Small Square (90×90)
b = Big Square (160×160)
t = Small Thumbnail (160×160)
m = Medium Thumbnail (320×320)
l = Large Thumbnail (640×640)
h = Huge Thumbnail (1024×1024)

Long time, no update.
Most of my time has been spent at work but any free time I had was spent working on the second part of the controller. A lot of the parts fit very snugly and I'm overall satisfied with the progress being made. It's a little difficult to get the raspberry pi out of the case because of how tight the fit is to the walls so I just left it in for the pictures.

As I am writing this I realized I probably should have swapped locations for the battery and raspberry pi for easy access to the microSD card but the easy ability for the battery to be removed makes me feel like this is not worth the effort. Besides, they didn't make it wireless for nothing

I figured it is important to note that the JST connectors on the battery and charging board have been cut off and soldered directly together so I am not completely sure how well it would fit if the two were still together.

I felt it would be important to keep all of the ports on the raspberry pi open and able to be accessed in case anything was added to them.

TO DO
Add L/R Buttons: Not exactly sure what to do for placement of these, the battery takes up almost half of the entire case with no room to add switches (possibly make an extension on one side that only has these buttons and a power switch.
Case Connector: Figure out a way to connect the two halves of the case, preferably not with screws or another pressure fit to allow ease of disassembly.

Ended up burning out the charging board while soldering . Ordering a new one so I should have the assembly completed next week. On the bright side I can test how it works with the JST connector. I will add the 3D models to this post once I am home. I still plan on changing the D Pad to not require pins similar to the ABXY. (Photos to be added soon)

3D Models Available Here

I don't exactly remember which size pin I used for the D-Pad so I included all three versions I had. Still printing the newest bottom half of the controller so the one in the picture is the old version. As of right now, hot glue is your friend to hold the buttons in place (sorry )

Now, time for pictures


Also, the wiring diagram. I put brackets around buttons that shared a ground wire.

Looks great so far!

Sorry if i missed it, but what kind of 3D printer do you have?

I've got a Monoprice Maker Ultimate. It's essentially a clone of the Ultimaker with a few differences.