Nintendo DS rubber pad reverse engineering

This is an example of buttons and D-pad using some DS conductive rubber pads.

This design is meant to be used in others projects.

I was working on a new handheld video game project, and to keep the thickness as small as possible I have decided to use some Nintendo DS lite rubber pad to design the buttons.

But it is quite hard to find any ressources about that on the internet, so I had to make my own designs.

I have created and tested this design for handheld video games devices. I'll use it on my next project to save some space. This design only takes less than 5mm between the housing and the PCB, and the buttons feel like some real video games controllers.

I now share with you all the files needed to create buttons with these rubber pads, especially the CAD files of the rubber pads and the files of the butons and D-pad. I hope you'll find that helpful!

Print Settings

Rafts:

Doesn't Matter

Supports:

Resolution:

tested with 0.2mm

How I Designed This

To design those buttons I firstly had to design the rubber conductive pads. For that I scanned the pieces I had to model to measure precisely their dimensions and geometry. I then build a 3d model of them. Then I created the mechanism of the buttons and D-pad. Finally I print the pieces to make sure that the mechanism and design worked fine... And it did works very well!

Instructions

You just need to print all the pieces, no support is needed.

Then you have to glue the "D-pad part 2" at the bottom of the "D-pad part 1" This piece is used to prevent the D-pad from being totally pushed and it allows he pad to rotate smoothly.

Category: Video Games