Slamwich

Given the price of the various Hitbox type controllers, even before postage and duty are added, I thought it would be an interesting project to whip together some sort of Ghetto gamepad using a cheap Pico and the excellent GP2040 firmware. Grabbing the fighting board unfortunately wasn't possible at the time of building/writing but the parts can be soldered directly to the Pico anyway.

My main criteria were: small, cheap, print as much of the pad as possible. I deviated from this slightly as without a plexiglass back I could have probably reduced the overall depth by a further 5mm. Even so, the finished gamepad is 210 x 160 x 30.

Parts:

1 x Raspberry Pi Pico

11 x Generic Cherry Mx Red Switches (note about these below)

6 x Buttons for menus etc (I used cheap 6mm momentary buttons)

Wire and Solder

Plexiglass for back. Not 100% necessary but can look nice.

TPU - Blue in pictures

PLA - White in the pictures

Buttons note:

I spent probably more time on these than any other part of the design. They work - actually pretty well - but could definitely be improved. The main issue with Cherry Red's is the amount of action the button has. I've hopefully solved that a little bit by hooking the switch down to "almost" activated. I've not tried but read that Cherry Silver's are better in this regard (less action).

Final note:

As always exports from Blender are several magnitudes smaller when dropped into the slicer. Simply scale up by adding a zero or two until things look correct. Also note I'm terrible at Blender so the models will likely have n-gons/hidden faces/any number of weird anomalies. They print fine using Cura.

Print Settings

Printer Brand:

Creality

Printer:

Rafts:

No

Supports:

Infill:

20%

Filament:

eSun PLA & TPU

Blue & White

Notes:

Category: Video Games