Single Handed Controller Upgrades!

hey there i thought i would make a video showing some of the changes i've made to my single-handed controller project basically trying to speed a few things up with custom circuit boards so i can avoid raising the price since everything is up in price uh yeah so let's get started i've already detached the face plate so i'm going to make some marks with the laser on this so i'll know where the parts go this is a right-handed controller which means i don't have to move the face buttons and to be completely blatantly transparent it probably takes about a half hour less to make the controller with the buttons on the right but i charge the same for both okay i got the laser marking from the laser so i'm gonna drill two two millimeter holes so even though i'm an american for whatever reason i use all metric when i build these at least by drill bits oh yeah cause you know what i'm going to put into that two millimeter hole an english size 256 screw oh oh the the the humanity dogs and cats living together this is what i used to use for the d-pad i was getting these from a place but then they got too expensive so that i had osh park make me a big grid uh sawing it apart by hand isn't a big deal because it uses the the bandsaw but the problem is these particular switches while nice most of the pad is under the switch so it's very difficult to solder by hand and there's a lot of like errors like you think it's solder but it's not ah here we go d-pad 2021 so i got these made and these use a different type of tech switch specifically these really small guys i picked these because they're quite flat which means i can make the deep the entire d-pad assembly itself flatter and closer to the controller also this should be easier to solder i mean obviously i've already done this before but as you see the um the pins they're rather exposed you can you know you can see the edge of the pin the only thing i'd be worried about with these is it's i mean since this is like just like the essence of attack switch it's very bare bones might be a little concerned about flux getting in there and fluxing up the joint like a fracking cylon man that was such a good show i heard they're trying to make it into a movie for some reason so even though these aren't the easiest thing to solder either um it's more obvious that they are connected which is good because sometimes i would build one of these controllers and i would go to test it and then one of the buttons wouldn't be working or be stuck on and i would make a lot of those in my reflow oven but still there can be errors underneath the switch some solder got into the uh vias but we can just suck that out with some wick as shania twain would say it's holding on to soda to save my life that's it shania twain you have crossed the rubicon of singing ben i think i've mentioned this before in videos but yeah i i went like 10 years without watching television probably from like when i graduated high school up until like the mid-2000s then i got like hooked on like history channel and world war ii stuff when shania twain was a big thing i was like what is the big deal right and then i then like when youtube came along and then like you know i saw your music videos and i'm like oh i get it now i mean it should have been obvious but i don't know it also took me i guess what about 40 years to realize the milwaukee brewers logo is a m and a b shaped like a ball glove i always just thought it looked like a ball glove i couldn't see the forest for the trees why does every singer come from canada is there something about canada that makes people want to sing maybe they sing to keep warm it's like oh hey it's so cold up here you know we gotta sing to keep warm all right neil young you uh you go take that uh you go take the dining room shania twain you're gonna go warm up the kitchen atlantis motor said we're gonna need you in the pantry and uh brian adams he can go to the living room okay everyone go warm up canada oh man there's way more canadian singers than that those are just ones i could think of off the top of my head oh canada now here's the new base um the old one looked like this had some walls to it this one's a little flatter just so it has a lower profile um yeah so i'm going to use tester's model glue okay model glue from plastic to pcb on paper it shouldn't work that great but it actually works this should lock in pretty tight because of the features around it and also you can see there's a hole in the middle all right i'll compress this and then i'll attach it to the controller didn't neil young make like some sort of mp3 player like sonos or something and it kind of looked like a rectangular pringles can i think the gag was that with that was that it was like all the music was really high bit rate you know as if no other player could do that right maybe it had like a good sound chip in it because i'm sure uh neil young is an expert engineer well obviously you would know a lot about sound he'd be like i'm going to get wait he's not british he'll be like yeah hey uh i'd like to make this mp3 player you know but i'm going to need like the bestest most choochiness chip i can get for it to make her go you know now one of the issues with these really flat tack switches is you can't just put a flat d-pad on it because it wouldn't be able to actuate anything so i made a new kind of d-pad unfortunately it kind of looks like the walmart logo maybe i'm subconsciously a walmart lover so see this little interstitial piece this goes down first and then this actually has little kind of little nubs that will actually push the buttons my cat likes to jump up on my nightstand and walk around on the clock like literally pushing my buttons and then the clock will get programmed to like some weird nap or the alarm will change so i'm like bud you are literally pushing my buttons same thing with the roomba i mean first i'm like oh the roomba since bud is never going to get a feline sibling his only choice chance might be of dog sibling but even that i'm kind of thinking no so i'll get him a roomba sibling so yeah when blood's being whiny i'll just push a button and turn on the roomba and that will distract him well it took but about one week to figure out how to turn on the roomba himself and now he loves to do it but of course but doesn't understand batteries or chemicals or compositions because he's a primitive neanderthal so the he'll start the roomba it'll clean it'll go home then it'll start it again and then it'll die because it doesn't get back to the battery charger in time these are just uh surface mount tack switches and i just glue them in place like when i first made this style controller i really thought these two switches were going to be the biggest point of failure but uh no the biggest point of failure well they do fail but they're probably third the big so the biggest point of failure is dun dun dun analog stick drift which isn't my fault then uh it's d-pad and then those here's a tiny little plug happy little clouds so this goes into the bottom see how it's i don't know if you can see it on camera but it's a little bit lower than the nubs uh because it pushes up to the pcb that's why there's a slight gap difference the d-pad rotates on the axes of the center point then you put this in place and then this is the part i don't like i have to glue it together but i can't print it like this because it's got two facing surfaces i guess maybe i could like maybe get like do a shapeways order like you know get some house to print this with like a powder printer or i could just you know get better at assembling them get good speaking of singers uh allison and i had this idea for a uh weird yankovic parody of a mariah carey song and it was gonna be the premise was mariah carey was going to be dating a photographer and the entire video was going to take place in the developing room of course nowadays people wouldn't understand that but in 1990 they would have anyway this song was gonna be you've got me feeling emulsion deeper than i ever had before and then the whole thing would be like you know in the red hues of the developing room and then she'd be like that was before auto tune mariah carey just just she could just do it all right so here's the new cap it's got like the teardrop shape that's one of those things where it's like i wanted the four cardinal directions of the d-pad to look more distinct that's why i separated them in the design and then i'm like oh no it's the walmart logo now that i've said that you can never unsee it what can i say except you're welcome you've got me feeling emotion higher than i ever before [Music] nowadays kids will be like what's emotion is that in fortnite i'm a zoomer apparently zoomers talk like valley girls from the 80s that's why they should have made a back to the future remake i know sacrilege but can you imagine a teen today if they went back to like 1985 and were trying to fix their parents they wouldn't know what the heck to do they would be a fish out of water okay let's let's let's talk turkey like oh my you can't remake back to the future it's like back to future would be a better movie to remake than most of the movies that get remade because back to the future is like a theme that became more relevant with time gen xers and boomers are way more similar than even gen xers and millennials to say nothing for zoomers let's think about it 1985 hmm i want to hang out with my friends how do i do it in 1985. ring oh it's a it's a touch tone phone instead of a rotary dial big whoop hello hi mom of my friend is my friend there hold on hey friend of ben ben's on the phone now we're gonna go watch jackie gleason in the 1950s it was the same thing there were no different means of communications for the average person yes in 1985 email existed cell phones existed but nobody used it how did you get your information in 1985 from a newspaper or a tv how did you get your information in 1955 from a newspaper or tv people had computers obviously that was you know computers in the home was a big difference radar ranges again we're talking about a movie where a teenager is trying to fix his parents those things really wouldn't have any effect on the story in fact i think you could make the character development even better it's like a major flaw with the original back to the future is that marty has no character development that's why in the sequels they give him that quote-unquote arc where you know people call him scared or yellow and he's like nobody calls me chicken needles nobody because they're like oh our main character has no development all right let's desolder the rumble motors you know in the xbox 360 these rental motors had plugs disconnecting them but i guess it was cheaper to pay someone in china to solder them in place than the cost of the plug plugs are actually one of the most expensive things in any device they're very expensive in the back i think it's probably a little too late to make it back to the future sequel they should have did it like four or five years ago i mean hell you could even reuse the reagan joke could have uh but so let's say it's present day and you have marty and who knows maybe marty's even a woman doesn't really matter well first of all don't start the movie with marty with a girlfriend you know like i got a girlfriend she's beautiful jennifer she changes in the second movie but have it be like marty's at school and there's a girl he likes okay i guess marty's a guy now uh it doesn't really matter because the sexuality of marty isn't well actually no it didn't matter because his mom falls in love with him oh no you'd have to keep it as marty because if a woman went back in time and the future father fell in love with her that would be gross but it's completely okay when it's when it's the mom okay so marty's at school right and there's this girl he likes and he like looks at her down the hallway and he uh he like texts her or pings her on insta but she doesn't respond and i think i just described like 20 scenes from rick and morty so then anyway marty goes back in time and fixes his parents and he learns about he learns more about human communication by being in the past marty comes back to the future and he goes into the school and he looks at all the students and everyone has got their head down over their phone and he walks through the school it's like he's he's been awoken he's like i can see the matrix right and then he walks right up to the girl that he likes and he's like hi and he asked her out on a date which also happens you know right there is something really easy you could do you can make a commentary on like modern phone culture and be like hey you know what in the past we uh we communicated better as people marty gets an arc along with his parents so what i did with this one was i drilled some holes so the wires can pass through when the time comes i need to let this glue dry a little bit more although it's probably okay actually while that while that dries i will remove the analog stick so this is gonna be right-handed controller which means this analog stick needs to be removed and moved to the right and then we also need to remove the hall effect sensor so how these work is the triggers move a magnet to and fro and the sensor detects the proximity or strength of the magnetic field and that's where the analog value comes from so the first controller to do that was the dreamcast the dreamcast had call effect sensors for both of the analog triggers and the joystick yes so there was i believe they had four qualified sensors on the pcb and joystick the analog stick just had a magnet in it so the four sensors could determine its position now the playstation 3 also used hall effect sensors the analog sticks looked pretty much the same except for the side where the um where the this is a carbon film potentiometer where that was it was a little integrated circuit with i believe four wires going to it so it was actually a hall effect sensor so it was much much much much much less likely to break so if you've got like a fighter jet or something and there's like buttons and switches in it they use hall effect sensors because technically not a mechanical switch just a magnet moving back and forth which makes it more reliable sony in the past had done something about analog stick drift but then is so often the case well hall effect sensors are expensive especially right now xbox uses allegros don't quote me on that i know you can replace them with allegros like a leg rolls are really hard to find because they don't have a fab switching on the hakko desoldering gun actually speaking of which okay this next part was sponsored by pcb way go to pcb way to have all of your pcbs made in a great way wow ben you're like the last person to do a pcb wave video whenever so this is what i had made flexible circuits let's take a look at one see that in the past i would buy through-hole hall effect sensors let me grab an example um like these right they're expensive and also through you know through hole is obsolete so a lot of through-hole stuff you can't even get anymore so i was having trouble finding through whole stuff and now you just have trouble finding the sensors so i designed this it is a flex circuit board that allows you to repurpose a surface mount sensor in uh you basically can mount it like a through hole sensor why did i put solder on that side so i call this my hall effect sensor recycler yes i know it has a certain anatomical look but hey you know what some shapes just suit the purpose through evolution or god or whatever you want to believe in evolution is pretty hard to deny i mean it doesn't mean there can't be some sort of flying spaghetti monster because you know it probably is it's big universe like you can go to uh a perfect example is uh if you remember in new york city um their their subway system is ancient oh so i'm using the hako fr 301 it's got like a cartridge it's pretty cool it's a standalone desoldering gun so i don't need like a whole station for it anyway but so much of it's just so old so ingrained it's like kind of difficult to fix so there are portions of the subway system that built over a hundred years ago and then humans just keep evolving to be larger i mean that's been happening you know for well as long as there's been humans but you can even see it like in the span of 100 years like i'm like five nine i'm like i'm like new york tall but i'm midwest short you go some of those subways the ceiling the ceilings are really low they're like lower than like an old basement it's like i could easily reach up and touch the ceiling no no problem whatsoever like like if you were like an nba player you wouldn't fit in there i mean seriously there might be like six foot five clearance but you think when they were made people were shorter really amazing place it's like that's my favorite major u.s city by a long shot okay now i'm gonna use this thin wire to butt up right next to the switches so i used to uh scavenge this i think it's like 28 gauge solid stranded ribbon cable i used to scavenge it from hard drive cables but again no one's used those kind of cables in like at least 15 years so now i have to basically just buy this cable new it's like it's not so much that it isn't green it's like oh man i used to get this for free and i have to pay for it i'm going to cover this with a hot glue and foam but i'm going to make sure that the connections are right notice how i'm going to the opposite side of the switch that ensures that the signal is going all the way through the switch because you could touch this part of it and that doesn't necessarily mean that the connection is good it just means that you're touching the wire that one moved a little bit but that's okay because we're about to arrest its development these buttons replace left bumper and l3 once my spit dries wow ben you really put your blood sweat and tears into this except for the tears part i don't think i've ever had one of these controllers make me cry although sometimes yeah the d-pad would be kind of finicky and i'd be like oh i wasted 45 minutes on that d-pad kind of makes me want to cry so make no mistake i charge people for these controllers i do it at half my normal rate that's as charitable as i can get like 2020 i guess because people were stuck at home playing video games i think i sold more of these in 2020 than i ever did i thought about 100 i did like 126 of these last year i basically always just mark the rightmost wire with the color i'm gonna i'm gonna take this i'm gonna bend it a little bit you'll see why not in a bit i'm gonna put that over there all right let's back up the camera okay so with this one there's a handy slit there thanks microsoft i don't even know why that's there maybe it's there for me all right so obviously there's going to be the right analog stick here so we have to avoid that oh don't worry there's more pcbs coming also what is it december 3rd now yes i have decided that this month in december i am going to well i mean i still got things like this going on but man let me get that we got like a batch of boards going to spooky anyway i should have more free time this december than i have and a good number of months so what i was thinking about doing is like app like kind of taking it easy because you know i am self-employed but i mean i still i don't didn't completely completely retire i just work less than i used to but this month i was thinking about working even less like at most maybe per day i'll make one of these controllers so the rest of the time i can use to get caught up on other things like rearranging my basement and also projects and videos because i know i haven't made as many videos lately or as uh substantial you know this video isn't as interesting as like oh ben fixes a rare watch my thinger although i do have people that want to send me more rare things to fix but i just you know i had to get to my other projects first i'm hoping to actually have more time to do that because i'm getting close on my arduboy game project so i'll have a video about that coming up probably in a week or so and there's some other stuff i wanted to work on i was gonna do i started on it um like the last microcontroller kind of like a mad max kind of apocalypse thing where the apocalypse is now i went on digikey actually it kind of reminded me of the dave jones video recently where he did like jelly bean components um it was a similar kind of thing where i wanted to keen i was looking i was trying to find what is the most plentiful microcontroller right now or i should say like a cortex uh arm cortex m0 and i found one it was like a dinky little sam d11 c so it's like this 14-pin chip with the usb so it's like what the heck would you do with this which is probably why they had so many of them in stock all right so this is one of the trickier saturn parts remember when i was talking about connectors see this connector right here that obviously connects the two halves of the boards together but the original launch the launch model the xbox one controller there was two of those connectors and it passed all the buttons through one to one now if you look over here here i'm soldering now thankfully there's test points for everything which i've already obviously discovered and memorized i'm going to get myself a ground reference here but what is this little chip right there well that is an nxp i squared c serial i o expander so for those of you who don't know that is a device where you can have i believe up to 16 io inputs device will store them in their own internal memory and then a microcontroller can pull that device using the i squared c format which only takes two lines and then the device will say okay it'll send back two bytes which is the status of its 16 io so microsoft added that integrated circuit so they could remove a connector if you want to get really pedantic about it that means the buttons which are attached to this chip that come over a serial bus which would be pretty much everything except for the b button um you probably get them well they'd be collected and then they would everything would be sent over as a frame right but if you're trying to run this thing as fast as possible that would create a lag bottleneck i mean a a pretty imperceivable one in the grand scheme of things compared to like a game engine speed but still so this is why you have to pay me to do this because i do a lot of fairly intricate soldering now feel free to copy what i'm doing here off the screen and steal work from me i mean i hope you have a steady hand i like a man we're the slow touch see how that goes all i wanna do is make love to you [Music] at least he's not singing kenny rogers again or kenny loggins how much you wanna bet kenny loggins is from canada kenny lobbins was born in everett washington in 1948. he was not born in canada but he was born in washington which is close that's close to canada just like where i live in wisconsin do i sound canadian some people say i sound canadian yeah watergate does not bother me so you have to use the memory of the wire so i'll take the wire move it further than it needs to go and see how the wire is angled down so when i touch it that way i know the tip of the wire is pointing right down in the solder blob which helps me get a good connection so you've probably heard me say a million times that knowing how solder flows and reacts is the most or one of the most important things about soldering it's the same thing with wires like understanding not not just understanding because obviously the actual metallurgy of it is beyond my comprehension oh that's kind of painful so you also pay me to do that look ben your fingerprints are all over this oh you mean it's a design that was clearly made by ben no i mean his fingerprints are literally in the hot glue inside the project so see if you wanted to like break into my cell phone oh yeah that could be that could be a hacker movie it's like angelina jolie would like take something that i built and then get my fingerprint out of the hot glue actually that would probably work maybe i shouldn't give people ideas we're gonna go on your phone and swipe right on everyone no now we've got these three wires coming from the face buttons i'm gonna separate the one on my left because that's l three the analog click in obviously that attaches to the board with the analogs i'm gonna flatten this one out with my uh thumbs a little bit of hot glue hot glue is great i don't know why people make fun of it i think it was mostly jerry ellsworth that made fun of me for hot glue back in the day it's one of the best inventions ever it's like microchip the wheel hot glue so the center one of these wires which is the one on the left is ground so i just need to attach that to the common pole of the tack switch so this is bringing the left bumper over to those face buttons and since the xbox controller is really simple unlike playstation controllers i should i should change i should preface that it's simple compared to the playstation playstation 3 controller was like really overly ridiculously complicated playstation 4 controller was less complicated playstation two and three every uh face button was analog like how hard you held a button made a difference very few games used it i think like madden might have in like one of the metal gear games metal gear yeah metal gear three did because like you would hold the a but you would touch the a button to like pull your gun and then you push it all the way to shoot anyway so them doing that meant that there was multiple analog voltage rails going to the buttons and it was really hard to modify which is why you didn't really see much modified playstation 3 controller stuff for me even though it did have the the hall effect sensors when they got to the playstation 4 they removed that functionality so the only analog button was you know the analog triggers and they still do them the same way which is a much cheaper method than house microsoft does it here but it also made the rest of the controller much easier to to work on because you basically you now have well actually there's a few anomalies but for the most part it's a ground signal and then the button and then you you know you close the button and the i'm going to carefully remove this magnet the utmost precision oh no actually kind of a finger probably a lot harder to cut through bone than plastic oh of course it would be unless the bone was like out in the desert and all dried up but yeah that's why it's like oh ben doesn't make playstation 4 accessibility controllers like well it's not like i didn't try just all those well actually it wasn't just okay so once you had the playstation 4 wasn't just the voltages the whole thing the whole face of it was a a silk screen circuit so not like this this is actually copper on a substrate i mean like pieces of plastic with conductive ink on them like how a keyboard is made and by and like the whole all the face buttons are like that so to interface with it um some guy made these um made these flexible pcbs like the one i just showed you actually i think i have yeah right here so he made these where you would put this between the flex circuit and the pcb of the playstation playstation controller and it would basically sniff the signals and then you could solder it there but there's sony changes their controllers all the time so there's also this model there are actually i got a bag of in my car lance gave them to me here in town um there's actually playstation 4 controllers with the same the same model number but depending on where the model number appears on the sticker on the back of the controller they have different internals not kidding it's ridiculous microsoft they made there's been three whole controllers there was the 2013 model xbox one controller 2016 xbox one s bluetooth and then there's this core controller which is the core controller is almost identical to the 2016 controller including that uh expander chip that i told you about that's actually they started doing that 2016. the only thing different about this controller is there's a share button other than that it's identical and fun fact these controllers are backwards compatible so you could actually use these on your old xbox one i actually still have an xbox one i did buy an xbox one no xbox series x yeah that's another project i've got in the works because of course i have to make it portable all right so let's take a look not too bad i need to put my decorative cap here i'm gonna check this make sure everything's working before i continue all right everything checks out i kind of wish the d-pad had more play to it although all the directions work it doesn't actually move that much now that's in comparison how it used to be before where it was way too loose so i think i might need to dial in like a happy medium but this one in this controller right now works so i think we're good all right i'm going to attach this four pin ribbon cable i'm going to attach it to the missing analog stick so we need four wires we need x y and then voltage reference and ground so we don't need all six wires we just need four now this ribbon cable is going to go to one of the new circuit boards that i made we'll see that in the final step of this project now they did make a few differences with this particular revision of the controller the previous version they did not use plated through holes for these controller vias so pleated through hole is where the well it's where the metal plate or you know the tin goes through the hole now before they only had i don't know if i have an example of it i might they only had the tin on one side there's pros and cons to that and pros that it's easier to solder con is that it's easier to damage because if you have a pad like let's say that pad right there right if it's only on one side of the controller it's only held in by the glue right there but if it's a pleated through hole it's connected to the plating on the inside and on the other side so it acts as kind of a pop rivet oh man i just weird dream last night about like rubber wheels patrick swayze and pop rivets it was patrick's i don't i was that's weird yeah he's like i'll show you how to use a pop rivet and i'm like what the hell man that was a weird dream let me see if i can find an example of that this is uh this is the 2013 model see where the analog stick went see how there's no vias on this side and they're only on this side and then sure enough you can see this one when i removed it these pads fell off because the copper is basically just glued to the fr4 so if you don't desolder it carefully you can you can lose it the negative of them being through hole is that it takes more heat to desolder it because you're having to peed up everything on the entire through hole not just one side so it's it's a ying and a yang it also makes the analog six a little bit more difficult to remove when you desolder them so here's the rear of the controller let me back up a bit so this is where the new analog trigger goes so we're going to take this analog trigger and move it over here and that's where our uh flex pcb surface mount sensor comes into play okay so here's the rear right trigger frame it's 3d printed of course i'm going to put it in place and use an x-acto knife to mark the entry point for the hall effect sensor yeah just easier to do it this way than to try to make some sort of jig that wouldn't be accurate anyways couldn't you just take the shell of a controller and put it over the other controller and then drill no it wouldn't be accurate trust me all right so use a little bit of hot glue to hold it in place and then i'll put in a screw to hold it in place so my rule with this one is i try to have at least two screws for every 3d printed part if not three so they have multiple contact points for the controller so how i designed these parts was i actually went on i think it was turbo squid and i bought a 3d model of the xbox controller then i put the model like in space in fusion 360 and then i designed the parts kind of right on it then i took it into mesh mixer and did a boolean subtraction so i took objects like this and then i subtracted the controller from it which created an object that had a concavity so it would fit up to the controller and worked out pretty good so the model while i'm here i'm going to drill a hole the ribbon cable to exit all right now i need to find a trigger with a magnet actually before i do that let's put in the hall effect sensor so got our hall effect sensor on the adapter pcb from pcb way i'm going to thread it through this hole here now we're on this side happy little clouds so a youtube video it was about um where did all the bob ross paintings go and they're definitely some place they're all unlike this uh i don't say storage facility it's more like uh it's like a shop and a strip mall then they're all held in the back and there's like this lady that like is the conservator of them so again just got like some testers glue and then i'm just going to put a little tiny dollop of hot glue over that who is texting me today leave me alone so when i changed uh sensors again i was using uh where is it here oh yes i was using a six millimeter by three millimeter neodymium magnets so if you use a three by six magnet it's too much magnetism so i'm using a three by three because if you recall that's that well you probably couldn't tell the magnet that i pulled out of the controller was a ceramic magnet because obviously it's cheaper that's like your garden variety kitchen magnet although i don't know i have all sorts of neodymium magnets on my refrigerator so not only do you need a smaller magnet so it's a much smaller magnet but even then i have it slightly recessed i don't know if you can see that it's recessed by about 1.5 millimeters otherwise it overpowers the sensor when it was a 3x6 magnet it was positioned like this so you'll notice i actually put the three by three magnet not in the center of where it used to be oh crap but on one side of it great now i gotta check my polarity again that's why i always keep one of these laying around so i get a polarity reference because it does matter every time you push one of these triggers a bird loses its way to the south pole wait the south pole i don't think a bird would go to the sun well i guess some birds well they wouldn't go to the south pole they'd just be at the south pole take a little bit of super glue push down the magnet with it because this is not metal so i can now let's assemble the trigger so i'm going to take this spring actually i need to order some more springs today for mcmaster car because right now i have no springs now there's a little tab there which prevents it from springing all the way out i used to use a half a spring to try to save money but the full spring gives you pretty good bounce also but you don't want it to be too hard to push the trigger although this trigger is not hard to push um because when people you know people have a limitation with their hands you're like oh we want you to do more things with one hand so you want something to be easier to press not harder um oh shoot did i freak out i didn't drill the other two millimeter hole holding on to love to save my life oh yeah this one has a little r on the circuit board all right i'm gonna find some thin cable actually i think i have some right here that'll work yeah and this wire will attach to the spot on the circuit board where the hall effect sensor was you know i should have oh who is texting me uh clarence angel i wish i didn't have any friends all right george you have no friends why why i need to move this so far i gotta move this sofa sorry george you don't have any friends to help you move that sofa oh no i take back my wish angel well george it turned out in this small town with eight women in it nobody wanted to marry your stunningly beautiful wife and well she became a librarian oh no even worse she wears glasses now oh mary well for one thing i'm glad you exist again but now i want to have a talk what why don't you become a librarian but george we have like 10 kids i don't care you should you should become a librarian and then help me pay for this drafty old house okay i've attached the three wires from the hall effect sensor to the original position and i basically used the red wire to indicate where the right was um so i'm going to fold this together and then i'll test it to make sure the hall effect sensor is working and then i'll finish up with the rear analog stick since your brother died in that pond when you were both kids he never grew up and saved an entire aircraft carrier full of airmen during world war ii well well i mean that's tragic and all but you know there's plenty of aircraft carriers we still won the war right well yes george we still did win the war but there was a certain person on that aircraft carrier who didn't survive well what was his name your funny little angel his name was john f kennedy john f who john f kennedy would have become one of the greatest presidents ever but because your brother wasn't there to save his ship john f kennedy never became president well that's okay right someone else could become president instead right well they did george but then when the cuban missile crisis happened all out worldwide thermonuclear war occurred or thermonuclear what so now not only is your wife an old maid who wears glasses she now has to walk alone in a post-apocalyptic thermonuclear war wasteland i want to live again clarence i want to live again hey you know you could call that version of the story it's a wonderful half-life or how many viewers i lost on that one okay so how i used to do this before was i would put potentiometers into this plastic casing and this would fit at the base of the controller just like that and then i would wire these potentiometers in parallel with the analog stick so you could adjust where the center point was like because this is meant to sit on your leg right so maybe you want to adjust it based off your play style or how you sit so i wanted to have those adjustments but wiring that up by hand was kind of a pain so what i did was i made some more circuit boards all right so this circuit board holds the potentiometers for you and it also has all the connections so all you do is you solder it up and then you attach the four wires from the controller and here's the great gag it actually works in both positions so if it's oriented like this this is for the left if you go like this it's for the right and then to select which way it is you just fill in the two solder blobs on the side you're using so in our case we want it to be for the right so we just put the analog stick in below the word right and we solder it in place now if you notice um the up and down that doesn't invert because it's the same either way so those solder blobs just invert the connections going into the the x because obviously that does change depending on how you use the circuit board so we have our adjustment pots here so they're going the opposite way of the analog stick one negative with these pots is not obvious where the center point is but all i do is i just you know plug it into the computer and then i tweak the center point once i have it all built so not a big deal so yeah before i would have to put a button i had to stick in the pots glue them in place attach a bunch of thin wires and then tie those thin wires to the wires coming from the controller then i would put the uh analog stick into just like a lame plastic piece then i would have to use bits of wire you know like my fabled wire bin use bits of wire to actually combine the grounds and uh voltage reference but now it's uh pretty easy just attach things to a circuit board saving myself time so i don't have to raise the price yeah so when this goes in here see those holes allow you access to the pots and i'm sure if people aren't clean these holes will collect a lot of grime and dirt but you know what your cleanliness is your problem so again hot glue just to get into position oh crap i forgot to put the things on oops ah man i got so wrapped up in my it's a wonderful life fan fiction i just forgot a simple and obvious step to the project okay now that it's been positioned with hot glue i'm gonna go through one by one and drill a hole and drive a screw to hold it to the controller and there's three screws so we have three points which is good because obviously this shaft takes a lot of abuse as does the analog stick but there's nothing i can do about that well actually there is something i could do about it i actually thought about making uh my own hall effect sensor analog stick but again right now it's like i need i need the hall effect sensors for well i do have quite a good back supply of them because of course i saved all the ones i removed from the controllers over the years so i have a few hundred yeah i actually thought about yeah basically ripping off the dreamcast making a little circuit board having four hall effect sensors having a joystick with a magnet on it that's actually the hardest part to build mechanically and then i was going to use a little microcontroller and it was going to read the analog signals coming from the hall effect sensors and then um the microcontroller thinking about using actually has a dac so the microcontroller could read an analog signal re-translate it and then create its own analog output that would go back to the controller but it's like oh so i'm going to use four hall effect sensors and two microcontrollers in 2021 to duplicate something that can be done by two carbon pots so it's like it's a bit sketch mag or sauce as they would say on reddit how are you doing fellow kids my skateboard over my shoulder so this shaft i had it a little shorter but then i bumped it up by about 0.42 inches the idea is also your hand see your fingers hold it so it gives you a better grip the ground goes to the red mark so i mean i guess i could cram this wire up inside but i'll just put that wire over there save it for something else overhead puke cam just like that steam deck hey you all enjoying your steam decks oh that's right it's still delayed you know i don't think it was just battery life that helped the game boy beat the game gear you know the game geared actually did pretty well game gear was awesome it didn't fit in your pocket where's the game boy yeah it's big but especially got like some nice baggy mc hammer pants what they call them parachute pants i don't think ever wait no i think i did have a pair of parachute pants oh it's that's embarrassing yeah i did anyway easily fit your game boy brick into one of those oh yeah i should show that game boy that i managed to get working 20 minutes after i finished the episode based off a suggestion in the comments it was the fuse all right so this goes right into the piece and if you can see it there but i've got a pretty aggressive fill it but i wanted to make sure i did that so that the cleanup of the part would be easier and then oh i think i actually have a new a new version of this ah yes i do so this is the old version this version is a little bit more aggressive so you can only put it on one way so you've got the slits here on the side for the screws and then um this portion butts up against the analog stick and that portion butts up against the tack switch and the reason i did that is because there's a pretty good i don't know if you can see it on camera i say that a lot don't i there's a pretty there's a huge uh chamfer that goes all the way down and i did that so it's easier to print the part with less overhangs or less support i should say but the negative of that was this pcb would move around and like up and down a little bit so i made this part more aggressive to lock it in place and i suppose they're going to want an analog stick with this so i better include that while while i have time so this goes on like this come on there we go now it's held in place securely now just put in these two screws and we are done son this outer hole since threads in it don't make a difference i should enlarge that outer hole just a little bit again just to save myself whatever time i can i'm sorry before these times i was able to easily find xbox controllers on amazon plenty of stock and then i want to say they were i don't know usually like 50 bucks now they're like 60. the stock is kind of nebulous actually it's easier to find them at best buy than amazon at the moment and then sometimes depending so dumb like the black ones will be like 60 and then best buy will want 65 for the white ones it's really annoying so i'm basically trying to save time so i don't have to increase the cost but yeah i've slowed down a little bit by documenting it but i did that in about two hours not too bad oh also i was able to get the game boy working as someone in the comments said it was a bad fuse so i just uh solder blobbed the few short for now i have one coming in a future order but uh as you can see uh it works yeah here is um quicks great game [Applause] [Music] get that quicks i'm gonna banish this quicks to the world of pagan life hack whoa that was close nice [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] well anyway i just thought i'd show you some improvements i made with the xbox single headed controllers basically making it faster for me to build so i don't have to raise the price i guess we'll see in a future video i'm gonna try to make more videos this month so uh yeah stay tuned

Channel: Ben Heck Hacks

Views: 19,083

Keywords: single handed controllers, shania twain, jimmy steart, JFK, cuban missile crisis, meatloaf, hackers, PCBWAY, flex circuits, neil young

Id: HpFHeBWAyq0

Length: 55min 19sec (3319 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 05 2021