Building a Custom Controller Using Sugru

there's a video gaming blogger named Vivek who needs special controllers in order to enjoy playing video games recently he started modding his controllers using a product called sugru sugru is a world's first moldable glue it sticks to many materials like glass ceramic wood metal and most plastics once it's removed from the sealed pack you have 30 minutes of working time to fix build and create whatever you need after 24 hours sugru cures into a strong and durable silicone rubber it's flexible and electrically insulating making it perfect for these kinds of projects the makers of sugru reached out to see if I could help Vivek make the custom controller of his dreams of course I said yes I'll be using sugru for this project along with all of my usual tools and a lot of elbow grease before we get started let's listen to Vivek story and learn more about his needs the following segment was produced by the makers of sugru at vivix home I am 28 and I live edition was good history fusion is just like a muscle wasting condition and that's genetic so over the years I've sold a deteriorated in my muscles I'm like I stopped working when I was nine and now I am caught me with my arms or my legs or kind of I have problems even speaking [Music] coming for me Gaming is very important because when I had to stop gaming I realized how kind of depressed I was because that was a big form of my enjoyment because he was a skate I when I was playing I just forgot about my body and just kind of enjoyed the experience because they experience is the most important thing for me for my game control the setup so if over the years they've gone through many iterations many problems that I kind of try and find a solution myself but a lot of the time now I'm running out of solution so I'm kind of having to use devices like sugru to make changes in our holding there's quite a few Xbox games that haven't been accessible but one of my favorite has been kind of Mass Effect I couldn't really get I'm like r2 button or kind of r1 on my playstation controller so at the minute I use quite a few switches one of my head so I can get around the problem with and kind of pressing those buttons there are a lot of issues with the buttons I need special software pressed buttons and also the shape of their face buttons the quite flat and I can't really press those buttons even though I've adapted them so there are a lot of kind of open things that need changing which is difficult kind of to figure out yourself you need a lot more at expert expertise [Music] okay I did some collaboration with sugru and Vivek and this is the controller modification he would like me to attempt so we're gonna take a horipad FPS plus Pro and use that as our base controller it's a third party PlayStation 4 controller one big thing that he wants to do is um change the face button so we're gonna take the triangle square X circle make them a little bit smaller and closer together same thing with the d-pad make it more like the Nintendo switch we're instead of across you have four little buttons also closer together not sure how we're gonna do that quite yet two analog sticks in the playstation configuration the one on the Left will have a little bit of a nub on the upper left corner so we could probably form those caps out of sugru down here we want to have two metallic things sticking out of controller these will be touch sensitive controls so instead of like doing the l3 r3 clicking into the stick which takes a lot of force you can just lightly tap either one of these rods so we can probably use an integrated circuit for that then up to four 1/8 inch headphone jacks which are used for attaching external switches like the ones that you saw on the video and then we'll also do some modifications to the shoulder buttons and here's a side view of the same thing he wants little extensions on the face button specifically triangle and circle we'll probably add those last you can see the touch sensitive rods here and then the l2r to extend them with sugru so you have a bit of a lever function to them so it takes less pressure to actually make them fully go and then another major feature is he wants to have a base and a stand on the controller so the controller can be capped at the proper height for him to hold with his hands but he actually won't be holding the controller with his hands the controller will be at the correct height so his hands can just wrap around it so it requires less strength to use so what I'll probably do is make it adjustable so the height and the tilt of the controller can be adjustable that way he can set it up however he wants and then add whatever sort of padding or gel he desires to the base okay so that's the plan of attack we're going to start by taking apart the controller this is the hoary pad FPS plus it's one of the very few third-party controllers for the PlayStation 4 you can usually get these off Amazon sometimes they're from third-party sellers you know but the problem is standard PlayStation controllers use silk screen for the circuits it's very hard to mod whereas these don't this is the silk screen circuit from a PlayStation 3 I believe they silkscreen just like a t-shirt conductive ink onto a piece of plastic and the real problem is how it connects of the main motherboard you have these um exposed pads here and those are pressure fit against the main PCB so you can't really piggyback out into it because the only way to attach this existing cable is to compress it on and that means you can't actually add wires on it either now the Hori is different it just has a blog standard PCB that's easy to mod let's take a look okay so this is nice look at how simple this is and everything is very well labeled see tells you exactly what everything is so see what they did here as they put the analog sticks on their own PCB because the analog sticks are deeper than the buttons one piece of counterintuitive advice is the best way to remove solder is to add solder bishi gives you a more heat mask coming off the iron I mean I can probably remove this without even using these solder inherent I just rake it back and forth slowly pull it out just like that then I can use this solder wick this is basically braided copper the reason it's braided is so it has more surface area which means it will suck up more solder here's a tip when you're disassembling something like this take the screws from each step and put them back into the posts that way you don't lose them and you know where they came from these little ribbon cable right here that's going to be the touch pad the cool feature on PlayStation 4 that never got used I mean when a metal gear game doesn't use your touch pad for some sort of weird function you know it's useless there's a tax switch click click click click click that's for when you press in on it and then this is an I squared C device basically giving you the X Y position of the touch it's pretty rudimentary if you look closely this has the same carbon pads across the buttons as the PlayStation 3 controller did that's because this thing has PlayStation 3 compatibility mode which means you can have pressure-sensitive buttons so in the design Vivek wants both of the analog sticks centered here so make it like a PlayStation 4 controller all the Hori is oriented like an Xbox 360 controller so I need to swap the d-pad and left analog stick positions so we have this inner PCB so basically I need to move the left analog right about there I think I could probably just use a piece of perf port for this RadioShack surplus bakelite PCB and usually these analog sticks map out pretty well to the point one hitch pitch some of them are pretty good match like the upper potentiometer here the left potentiometer isn't really so I was gonna be like carve out a small area but the four mounting points match up pretty good to a point one inch pitch area as does the collision tax switch right there gonna use a one point five millimeter bit for this one issue sometimes it happens is if you drill from the opposite side of the pad you'll lift up the pad on the other side doesn't seem like there was too much damage here though cool now that I know that works what I can do next is position the other analog so that it fits where the d-pad used to be I can also copy over the screw mount positions so this new piece of perfboard fits exactly where the old one was well one of them lines up at least guess we don't need to go that far over since that analog stick isn't going to be there cool took me a couple tries but I have a bakelite PCB cut out here use my bandsaw it's going to make sure it fits in the controller the way it should and most importantly make sure that the analog stick is centered nicely in the hole screw that in place okay analog stick looks pretty good it's maybe a little bit too far to the left I'm actually going to solder this analog into place just so it won't move around while I'm doing other things yeah I'll lay this um piece of snipped lead across it and I can solder that to the legs and the pads and have a pretty solid connection yeah see now we have a little bit more of a slot so I have some leeway when I adjust it yeah I'm not feeling any interaction with the can and the supports under the stick feels good I did talk to him about weakening the sticks there is a spring inside of the analog if you take it apart I'm just not sure how much of it I can remove without you know there's a certain point where this also needs to return the centre otherwise we're making an Atari 5200 joystick here's a question can we weaken the force of the spring inside of this analog stick well firstly around to take it apart so I've got a metal can here it's got these little tabs and those tabs alright what's holding it in take off these potentiometers they should just pry off yep okay that should reveal it come on there we go got a little bit of grease in there all right see this white shaft in the middle that's where the spring is it's underneath it because like I'm taking apart a clock there we go there's the spring how do we weaken it all I'm waiting on Springs I think I could probably work on the touch sensor have a bunch of these laying around this is the Atmel QT 1070 multiple inputs and outputs you can use it as an I squared C device or you can just use it as a standalone direct connection which I only need two touch sensors now this is a surface mount chip it's most modern stuff that you might actually want to use it's already the surface mount so I can just use one of these adapters solder it to it and then they'll be you know actually workable going to use my stick vise hold it in place like so what I like to do just put a little bit of solder on one of the pads if you come across an integrated circuit that doesn't have a really obvious circle to indicate pin one we want to do is look at the way the text is moving so in this case the text is going from left to right from that side and that tells you pin 1 is to the left and below where the text starts there should be plenty of room inside that controller to embed this little board I guess we could have more than I mean I think in standalone mode this gives us four touch buttons I'll just add some headers over here so I can attach my bench power supply to it there's a regulator inside of the controller right there I'm just going to go out on a limb and guess it's 3.3 volts I'm sure this chip will operate at that range all right well I'm gonna wire this up based off the demonstrations in the PDF all right I fell the datasheet it's pretty simple for standalone mode you just pull pin to high and that's the mode pin and then make sure reset us also pulled high so it doesn't go into reset which would be if reset was low I've got these two LEDs on the outputs and then 4.7 K resistors on the input so I the theory as I touch the end of these and these lights should light up so these resistor leads would connect to whatever rods we put in from the controller as he has specified here I might actually just use like volts because then I could like screw the bolt into the plastic put a nut on the back of it to secure it and then I could also use like some sugru to really hold it in place it's still nothing let's hook this up to a meter oh you know what I should have read the manual but it's an open collector output which means it needs a pull-up resistor or otherwise you're not going to actually see a digital transition it's an open collector basically it's open and then when it's activated like this it pulls low so you basically need an external current source in order to see a change so I'm gonna hook up a resistor put it into the negative of the LED and then I'll connect the positive of the LED to the power source then we'll see if that works that could brick to our advantage because unlike the face buttons I don't think l3r 3r pressure-sensitive they're just on or off and then almost always what happens is you basically have the sense input for a button pulled high and then when you push the button it goes to ground and makes it zero so that could actually work here we could basically just hook this directly up to the lxly and it would pull to ground simulating the button press yep there you go all right I'm going to basically simulate what it would be like in the controller so I'm going to add a 10k pull up to the line 10k pull-up resistor so that will make that line normally high and it'll only go low if the touch sensor is activated all right let's apply voltage zap all right we're at three point two volts camera which one it was yep so yeah by using a pull-up resistor the touch sensor is basically you know pulling it to ground which is pretty much the exact function that we need to replicate the click intact switches on the left and right analogs cool so I mean we can attach this with very few components we probably don't even need to use the pull-up resistor because that's already going to be present on that button so yeah we'll just hook up this touch sensor I see in place of the left and right click in sticks the new Springs came in so it's like this other spring but it's much thinner metal let's see if it fits in here all right it fits that part I'm concerned though it won't fit around this shaft it doesn't want to go all the way down okay so the trick is how to get that thinner spring to fit it on this white plate I can't just cram it on because if I do that a lot of the spring will be basically locked to the shaft and it will lose its you know spring qualities so you can see the difference here here's the original spring see how far goes on look at that now that I got it to fit although it's not super loose I wonder if that'll make a difference I guess we can put this together and see if it still works you can never have enough three in one oil that could be a commercial more rich chocolatey three in one oil please all right compress that in place it was actually oil on the bottom of it so I'll add some more never actually taken one of these this far apart with the intention of putting it back together got the mechanism back together it's definitely weaker than it was before which is what Vivek wanted it still has that issue that all modern sticks do or is if you go too far in one direction it stays there my concern is that since the spring is weaker it would have more of a chance to stick over there it would you know basically take more intervention for it to go back to where it needs to be and that's very easy to move of course adding the potentiometers will add a little bit of resistance I did remove the clicking button see what they do is they have a little tax switch there and when you push in on the stick and that shaft presses it got the PCB mounted and the analog sticks are pretty well centered and now they're very weak I will need to put some suger around this one so it has a ring like this one otherwise if you push it all the way it will stay there think I'll tackle the d-pad next he wants it to go here but he wants it to be smaller kind of like the close together buttons on a Nintendo switch I have one of these some what Microsoft sent me this don't ask why but you know there's a traditional d-pad there I wonder if it would fit oh this one's Wireless why are there no wires connected to the Internet it's Wireless there's its rubber pad I wasn't there good it's using the same signaling style where it's got one common going to each one which is going to be some sort of analog to digital converter sensor and then it's got a feed going to it okay I think what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna basically chop off this side of the board how does this fit inside this shape ah it's bigger than that circle hmm that's close I mean it might be close enough we could actually angle the buttons a little bit so the buttons are close together but they could have flanges at the bottom which actually contact the points I cut down some of these tabs and made some marks I think if I slice the circuit board off here at this black line and also carve out an area there or that circle is for one of the mounting posts we should be able to get this part to fit I chopped down as little as possible so I still have access to some of these traces here for rewiring the d-pad itself I think it should yes it does fit great I'm gonna cut away a little on the sides to make sure that it fits inside of that circular chamber where the analog stick used to be it's probably hard to see with the camera but yes so we have this circular area here now the rubber fits entirely inside of it so conveniently there's vias on the back of it for pretty much everything the up via got chopped off so I just added this little wire here all right here is the d-pad and I've cut down the silicon just like in my earlier test so these buttons were easier to push all right here's the inside of the Horry pad mini right off the bat you can see these parts are separated once again but what's nice is not so much that these are in one unit because that's not the most important thing the important thing is the rest controls are horizontal like this with space for the analog stick unlike the previous PCB I know he wants this shape and size so I'm thinking maybe we could just put the circuitry inside of here I mean I've done stuff like that in the past many years ago seems like it would oh yeah I mean we'd have to make some adaptors but I know we could use sugru well I guess the next step would be figuring out how to take the guts from the mini Horry and getting like the d-pad and the ABXY in place a 3d printed this little test cap it has a smaller grouping of the buttons which is what Vivek wanted and it's got a little bit of a filling on it the idea is this should fit into this hole yeah it's pretty good fit isn't going all the way so I think what I'll do is I'll reduce the outer diameter of the lip a little bit let's give this a shot here is the button and it's got a little flange like a little foot on the end that's because the actual pad isn't as close as we want it to be I also gotta figure out how I'm gonna assemble this for real all right let's snap it in so if you look straight down on it you can see how the silicon pads underneath aren't lined up with our new smaller holes but that boot shape should make up for it so we have some slots here which will make it hold our tab in place then keep it from rotating I think I'm gonna print these little taller so normally a button is 0.1 inch off the surface of a controller but I want these to be a little easier to get at and also I'm gonna have the upper one be a little bit taller and the lower one be a little bit shorter so they're kind of angled up okay got a black cap printed up and a whole bunch of little buttons okay so the reason I printed so many of these couple reasons one was in case some of them aren't so good another thing is um the more different things you're printing on the printer the last dwell time there is I wanted to make sure that the stai raishin layers weren't too ridiculous because when it changes position or speed or layer sometimes it'll like leave a blob behind so by printing so many of these we basically ensure that only a few of them might have that defect you know I bet I'd be pretty good at that operation game now as an adult oh I just ruined a femur bone yes I know it's redundant don't email me and what's the best way to place this no maybe instead of trying to put these in in their final position like this I can put them in rotated right so we want to go like this if I can remember which way they were rotated I think I could probably rotate them using these tweezers and get them to lock into place well I'd have to go and make things so complicated it's cuz I'm a skater boy okay I promise to never say that again Oh Who am I kidding I'll say that again why do I do this to myself okay so this is the top one and I'm going to rotate it well that would be counter clockwise from the front so I'm gonna rotate these all in the same direction I hope that's the way he wanted the buttons he wanted him to be small and switch like oh boy that was a lot like picking a lock so what I realized was if you put it you hang it upside down like this then you can let gravity pull the buttons into place now that my very much like picking a lock assembly is in place the buttons are working I think I'm gonna use some black sugru to hold it in place and maybe also put a transition onto this lip here let's get this sugru out onto a tray nice I'm gonna put some in this corner first so I can transition between this disk and that disk you can remove sugru using a knife so if they need to do something with this d-pad they could always remove it my fingerprints are all over this oh you mean it's very obviously I've been heck Andorran design no I mean my fingerprints are literally all over it in the sugu hashtag correct use of word literally I've tested this with other pieces of plastic sugru will stick to this shiny ABS pretty well so we should be all right here I also want to make sure that the sugru does not impede the full range of the buttons yeah we can use a sugru to ease the transition on this piece of engraving plastic make it look a little bit more part of the controller a little oh no we're over the completely useless touchpad area however will we survive I want you to sculpt me like one of your french controllers I just had a cool idea this knurled screw that I'm gonna use for the touch sensor but if you use it to give the sugru some texture oh look at that that's sweet that's right it's a texturizing rod well I'm going to do that for the rest of the project next I need to think about the 4 action buttons now this is a circuit board from the hoary mini and I kinda want to use it so we'd have our analog sticks are there and we'd mount this just behind it there should be enough room so I think I'm gonna do is in this I'm gonna carve out this plastic here then I'm the mini controller I'm going to carve out that same area and Transplant it into this slot and then attach it using sugru then possibly extend the shafts on the buttons and then like with the d-pad that I transplanted there I'll just wire that manually between them I have a scored a diamond shape with my exacto knife around these buttons and now what I can do is I can cut away the inside and bend it and that should give me a pretty good opening [Music] I'm gonna cut away the middle that way I have a breakpoint yes give me a resistance because there's yep you know the circular guides on the back actually if I break those off here it'll probably increase my chances of bending the front all right I've got a nice diamond shaped hole cut out then if you look at this we can see that the new buttons will fit easily inside of this and they'll be closer together than the old buttons were all right got a trace there so this will be easier to cut out because I'm not trying to make a hole in the controller I'm trying to remove the buttons from the controller so I can just hit it with a dremel on those angles there we go I also marked which one was the top so that the buttons will insert the right way now let's see how close we got not too horrible the thing that'll be nice about this is we can just take the existing buttons and pop em in I use some hot glue to fix this piece of plastic in space now I'm going to use sugru to cover up the gaps and blend it as best I can fresh sugu here I'm gonna kind of use it more like a clay I'm gonna push it in what are how good of a transition you could actually make with this stuff like how thin could you apply it and still have it be stable well actually if i sweared it across the surface i can make up for the deviations and height see like right there the blue plastic is a little lower than the original controller hey I can hide the fact that the plastic was blue no one will ever know knurled knob to the rescue that's so cool it's like an ASMR thing yeah now that we've added our amazing texture now we can cut out the buttons yeah so let's see if I remember from prep the rapper or God of War where all the buttons are God of War prep of the rapper crossover oh I can also use some sugru on the inside to help support it so I'll just add it around here and a few other spots I do need to keep this clear because that's where one of the shoulder buttons is gonna go okay I've got a bunch of sugru around the inside of the buttons as well to give lots of strength looks like everything fits I can probably just trim anything that doesn't fit after it dries okay now I need to put a PCB here for the buttons there are some conveniently located post and one of them actually lines up but I don't really want to put the circuit board this far back so what I think I might do is take another one of these mini controllers take it apart chop off its PCB mount it down there that way this PCB can be a little bit further back and I'll just hand wire everything to it so there's some really nice obvious labeled test pads here that we can solder to I'm gonna cut it right there so we still have that screw post so we have our test pads here that we can connect to and these buttons just go to ground so we can use these test pads for the signals and then grab any of the grounds and use that further side of the connection or look there's even a ground test pad right there oh so convenient there we go I cut these screw posts out of the other plastic shell and I screwed them to this PCB I'm gonna place this here and then just shave off a little bit at a time until they're the right height and then I'll secure this down with sugru okay the sugru has set overnight let's see if we can remove the screws without the posts coming out all right so we've added new screw posts using existing plastic shafts and sugru I've added back in the rubber buttons for turbo and a sign and these are going to become share and option on a PlayStation 4 controller I find the option button awkward to hit so I'm sure it's even more difficult if someone doesn't have full hand functions so yeah moving these down here I've just added tax switches onto the sport so we have the the PlayStation button share option and then touch pad click see how the but the tax switches was go up to the rubber buttons hold them in place and then we should get clicky action nice now I positioned the post a little loose because it's easier to add material than to remove it alright I've carefully cut away two sides of each one of these silicon domes so it's easier to press so I've attached this thin wire to the four action buttons as well as ground and what this will allow me to do is to bridge it over onto the actual live controller here you may note I've added a header here that is for the USB disconnect I just added that so we can work with this without having the USB cable hanging off of it and driving me mad okay I have glued the actual driver PCB in place and now I can start wiring up the d-pad and the face buttons all right I've got the d-pad wired up on this side and the face buttons wired up on that side now I can plug it into a computer and see if it still works let's try these buttons all right looks like they all work okay so for the l3 r3 we're going with the touch control I have a three quarter inch screw here in a threaded aluminum shaft all right I've made a ring with the wire and tinned it with solder to keep it in line let's see if we can screw this post over it all right I've got the to touch sticks in place I'm soldering this adapter directly to our test PCB here basically just flowing the solder through the vias so it connects directly to the pads yeah so we see the little regulator right there and that's no doubt where 3.3 volts is coming from which is what we can use over here so I'll just jump a wire over there and then make the other connections try to figure out what's what here on this regulator here's five volts in okay so this is also gonna be duplicated on one of these pins I so I assumed yep okay so that's in in so the other one's gonna be ground or another one's gonna be ground there's ground which means that one right there is gonna be 3.3 volts out for the ground connection let's scrape off some solder mask here happy little solder mask a piece of lead wire from our resistor or something connected there now we can take that twist it and go over this just you know it's not the way to add a little bit of rigidity to it gonna heat it up push it down let it cool she'd be good alright take the resistor twist it like that twist it like that maybe just give it a little bit of a turn there alright so these are going to be our two inputs and then our two outputs are five and six and of course they're swapped around so this resistor drives that output and this resistor drives that output of course because why wouldn't it be backwards okay so we have our Atmel touch sensor here it's hooked up to 3.3 volts and ground we have our two touch sense wires going through these resistors and the shafts and then the result is going over to the l3 our three inputs on the main board let's see if it works all right there's the left and the right there is a little bit of lag of it disconnecting but that shouldn't actually really affect anything okay going to do the shoulder buttons next but there is an issue you need to address so here is the mini controller now I remember this is what we're actually using for our driver guts notice how there are four connections to the shoulder button there's l1 which is non analog and l2 which is analog as opposed to what was on the Hori FPS Pro which is ps3 compatible as well see that they have a common going to both of the buttons and then two separate returns but I need this mechanically to fit into the controller so I need to figure out a way to split this I think I have a pretty good solution here I cut a slit in the copper trace so now the analog button will be these two wires and then I'll just add a wire I checked there should be plenty of room so this wire shouldn't cause any mechanical interference okay I tested it and the analog button worked pretty well but the shoulder button was stuck on and I think the issue with that is we have the analog carbon contact across it but it's not providing enough resistance so what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my exacto knife and basically scrape away the middle of it to separate it and then it should work like a normal button does okay I'm going to test the resistance of it here's a protip remove one of the connections before you test resistance on things like this because if you don't you'll have internal resistance in the circuitry or rather an internal connection and that will give you a false reading okay open line should be good to go alright next I need to wire up the two main analog sticks so here's the pattern circuit board from the original mini controller and here's what I built one of the sticks is in the same orientation see how it's got three three three three the other one isn't so I just need to make sure that I wire it up correctly basically with an analog stick it's a potentiometer right and you sense it in the middle and then you have usually ground on one side and then a reference voltage on the other side so in this case if you push the stick up the sense pin goes closer to ground so when I rewire it over here see right here this is the the vertical pot so I want to make sure that this pin is connected to ground and this pin is connected to the reference voltage and then even though it's rotated you know 180 degrees it will still have the same functionality as the original stick orientation so I've got the pattern here I just have to follow it okay I've got the LX ly rx ry cables attached i've got ground and reference voltage attached let's test it out they work but it looks like the range is not going the full distance see that should also do that for the right stick yeah those should go completely down here's a stock Hori controller well mostly stock and as you can see you easily get the full range I pulled the analog caps off so I could just test the stick range and it definitely can go the full distance without the caps on it so tells me it's a mechanical issue not an electrical issue got these 3d printed shafts so the idea is you know these can be removable so Allah I'll print and sculpt extra that I can send along and I change the shape a little bit so we've got kind of a X there and I will build up the sugru I'll have a little nub on the upper left of the left stick which is what he wanted so I need to build up from the sides and up I can't really go underneath it all but it is multiple glue so it will stick to the surface oh I should probably wash these surfaces to make sure they're as clean as possible hey I found some orange sugru I think that's what he wanted in the first place Oh sticking to the inside groove that I made that's good that's why I put extra features on this and so just having a plastic disc I wanted there to be more you know surface area that the sugru could stick to so I want to get this to the side of the plastic piece but no further than that because I don't want it to collide to the edge of the plastic controller so I'll just use a knife and make sure I've got it level I won't have a bit of an indent but every time I try to press with my finger the sugru sticks to my finger and pulls up I'm gonna try licking my finger yes sure enough excuse me a little bit of a barrier now I can use that to shape the sugru without it being pulled back up by my finger there's probably water and sugru as is yeah it kind of smooshed over the sides more than I would like but these plastic shafts are removable so once it's cured I can just lift it up and then carve off the bottom gonna lick this exacto knife yeah and use it to make a nice center point I also need to add a little nub that he wants on the upper left side of the left hand stick alright let's add the little upper left-hand nub thing scored the surface so we have something to grab on to was that class I took in middle school I guess it was art class and yeah well when you're attaching clay to clay you know you need to score it so there's like surface area so I can stick that's right free knurling ah fun jewelry craftspeople create the exquisite ring for your special day you know I guess I can just make a whole bunch of these caps and send them all along and see which one he likes the best I'm actually gonna carve out a little bit of that bump I think there should be a decent circular area in the middle still I don't want the bump to affect it too much alright I made two more designs a slight variation on the ones before so I'll just keep doing this until I run out of orange sugru you know let them cure over here on these screws hopefully gravity doesn't affect them too much time to work on the stand alright I 3d printed some parts here is a base I can use these holes to screw it to whatever the main base is probably a piece of thin plywood with a gel foam on it and this is the riser shaft it has a groove in the back for a set screw let's go in just like that then I have a 1/4 inch socket cap screw here so we can do is we can take this nut put it into that slot come on I think our hole might need to be slightly bigger can you hear that you're all the threads actually kind of touching the plastic so when you're doing something like this we're using a set screw to set the depth of something else you can't have anything else restricted or threaded otherwise it won't work drill bit set get one size above 1/4 oh don't worry international viewers I have Imperial and metric drill bits there we go see how it goes through nicely now there we go so now you have this so he'll be able to lock it in whatever height position he wants this cat's trees probably unnecessarily long but oh well now up here I have another pivot so we can tilt the controller see that and then I've got a lock nut which is a nut with a nylon insert that will keep it in place it's just like assembling IKEA furniture you know what I have never been to an Ikea that is my confession not that I have any guilt over it I attached the plate with screws I'll put nuts on the inside to hold it in place yeah so the idea is you know his his the ball of his hand can rust on the mat so it doesn't actually have to lift the controller he's kind of holds it in place for me maybe a little lower heat Vivek wants 3.5 millimeter headphone jacks placed in the controller these can be used for external switches it's kind of a standard way of doing it trying to figure out where to put them I thought about putting them both under here however if you're holding the controller your hands might hit them so maybe I should put like just one down here and then one on this side like if you're holding the controller like this if something was sticking out there that shouldn't shouldn't get in the way this DeVault batteries getting a little bit museum so do you alright so on this side obviously I can just wire it up directly to where it needs to go then for the backside since there's no other electronics in it I'll probably have just like a header disconnect so you can split the controllers if need be okay I got the headphone jacks wired up and I put the retaining rings in place they shouldn't hold pretty well now I will add these to the back of the controller as well so a Vivek wants triangle circle and then down here we'll have r1 and r2 that way if I have as many options as possible for using this controller all right I have l1 r1 and a common ground hooked up going to this header here so I can detach the halves of the unit so I'll just attach a matching header on the inside of this and then that should do it for all of the internal signals alright let's mark the polarity of this wire that we use to connect the halves together kind of worried about this USB cable it needs a strain relief but I'm gonna exactly sure where to fit one cuz there's so much stuff in this controller already it's kind of tricky to squeeze it together you got to get that shoulder buttons lined up I did make a few more changes to this the plastic disk here actually recut that on the laser with a slightly eccentric hole meaning the hole is not centered that way I can make sure I had full range of motion with the stick I also reprinted the left stick a little taller than the right one just to make sure we get the motion we need so even though I made a whole bunch of random caps or both of the sticks I need to make some new caps now because I now have a taller stick over here but at least now there's options although I ran out of orange suger so I'm going to go with this light green sugru ASMR it's kind of like split pea soup color insert exorcist joke here I'm not using spit this time I have my NASA shot glass with just regular water in it there must be some oil in this - look at how much the water beats up I cut out this base out of six millimeter Sentra which is an expanded PVC foam on my CNC machine I didn't have exactly the right size bit for the size four screws so I just drilled sixteenth inch screws and I'll just drill them out the slightly larger bit and then they should fit the screws we need your hands ago here right so they can put gel pads or whatever they want there for support I will just attach this and then we'll have a really nice sturdy foundation for this controller this is about the size of a microwave dinner so I would assume it would fit on a standard tray alright so we have our nice base here let's put the controller in place that feels good nice so I'm not actually holding the controller the controller is just being held in space at the same angle as my hands Wow it looks like a museum piece complete with cool stand but of course that stand is there for a reason well looks like it's pretty much done I think we can send this off to Vivek and see if it helps them play video games click the links below in the video description to see Vivek using my controller over on the sugru website

Channel: Ben Heck Hacks

Views: 1,124,331

Rating: 4.8556795 out of 5

Keywords: gaming, accessibility, sugru, ben heck, hacks, dremel

Id: IeRXhhXvDj0

Length: 56min 35sec (3395 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 03 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/fastal_12147]

Full disclosure: this video was sponsored by Sugru, but I think it's an interesting video nonetheless