One Handed NES Controller (part deux): Putting it together

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Well, It's been a really long time since I've actually be able to work on this thing but, I've finally got everything ready so let's dive in.

 After desoldering both the chip and the NES controller cable, I purchased a Wii nunchuck controller to actually house this in.


Now, As you can see, this thing gives us space to put the 5 way mini joystick two buttons that will act as the B and A buttons in a position like R1 and R2 on the dualshock controllers. The only other thing we need to add is one more button to reproduce the select button.

Here are the things we need to reproduce:

Up
Down
Left
Right
Start
Select
B
A

the mini joystick gives us
Up
Down
Left
Right
Start (center click)

the C and Z buttons on the Wii Nunchuck controller will be B and A respectively.

I could do something overly complicated to replicate the C and Z button assembly that already exists inside the controller but why go through all that when it's already made for you. So, after disassembling the controller I was able to take out the board, desolder the existing analog stick and also desolder the C and Z button assembly.



After that I needed to see which wires were which. There were three wires, red, white and black. It's pretty much always safe to assume that a black wire is the ground wire so I hooked my multimeter up to it and tested which button was connected to which wire.


After I figured those out, I wrote down which button it was connected to and then moved on.

The next thing I needed to do was to make sure that the schematic (will be uploaded to the downloads page) I found was correct and that everything functioned as planned. So I got out my breadboard. Basically a breadboard allows you to put everything together without soldering or making any real permanent changes. You just hook wires with stiff ends on them into spots on the breadboard and you've made a connection.

If you'd like to learn more about breadboards, Sparkfun has a good article on the subject. https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/how-to-use-a-breadboard

A typical breadboard in the wild.
This all looks like a mess and that's because it is. It's all hooked up with jumper wires and alligator clip leads. However, I was able to get make sure that it's working.








The Directional Pad replacement piece (5-way mini-joystick)


Here is the top on the 5-way mini joystick. I have to give a shout out to ben heck (@benheck) because he actually ended up giving me this piece.







Here's a video of my test just to make sure it's all working properly.


I know it's not very exciting but, all of the pieces are actually working and I killed a goomba. Rather than make one long TL;DR post, I'd rather break this post up into two. Next up, Soldering it all together.

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