This is something I’ve been thinking about doing for a while, the quality and price of C64 joysticks are shocking. So ordered the parts for about £15 and designed a 3D printed box. It’s not much to look at, but it is very sturdy and over engineered. Should be up and running when I get the cable gland, and the fire button.
There is some wiggle in the dead centre of the stick, but turning up a new micro switch pusher will solve that.
Where does one buy a decent joystick these days anyway??
Oh, that’s a beaut. I was thinking of doing something very similar, I think you may have sparked me into action! I’d been thinking about doing something like the Adafruit Cherry MX Gamepad build as well, but with a 9-pin D plug and enough buttons to play Megadrive.
A couple of years ago I hacked up this iPad docking joystick, which had a good stick but horrible buttons, to use mini arcade buttons and wired it to the PCB from the spongiest off-brand controller I’d ever touched. Used leather-texture vinyl on the top and filled a blank in with fake wood, like Atari would’ve done. Green button is from a Dreamcast controller I still regret pulling apart for bits in the early 00s…
I can post the STL files here, or put them somewhere you can download them. So kind, I thought my design looked a but industrial, I don’t go in for making things look good. Working ok without falling apart is the goal generally. My design needs a little tweaking, had to get the file out to fit the joystick. No biggie though.
Buttons… I’m going to use one of these;
Joysticks are easy to build, but so very expensive!! Will dig out the one I got from ebay, honestly… it’s just shite. Not worth the risk to send back.
Nearly forgot, can the Adafruit Cherry MX Gamepad be hooked up to an 8 bit machine via some sort of wireless converter to D plug type thing?
What was I thinking buying this! Avoid at all costs…
The only thing I kept was the cable (all 9 pins connected), and that’s only the length of my arm.
Thanks for the offer, but I guarantee your STLs won’t help for me! Decades of taking things apart for projects that never go anywhere, and then keeping only some of the parts (like the joystick) and not others (like cases, PCBs etc) means I’ve got a pretty esoteric set of parts to work with. So I’m having to build something to hold the joystick bit from one of these:
It’s a nice, small, microswitched joystick so I’m mating it with the mini arcade buttons I used in the other one. I’ve actually got another one somewhere in the piles of junk around me from my dreams of building some kind of arcade cabinet 20 years ago!
As for the wireless gamepad thing, the Adafruit project uses Bluetooth HID so it would require a bit of decoding at the retro end. I’d be more inclined to use something like a couple of nRF24L01 boards to handle radio communication and have a dinky microcontroller converting the bitstream into pin statuses.
Ok, I get the same thing… what was that saying again? The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Mini arcade buttons? May put a second button on the side, and a mini arcade button could be the solution. I’ve put the cable and the cable gland on, plus the button riser. It gets the button in a position that’s comfortable with the arthritis in my hands. Got a good long cable too, so I can move around.
Looking really neat! It reminds me of a joystick I saw in a magazine in the 80s (the blue ball top is what does it I I think)
These are the sort of buttons I’ve been using (you can get them cheaper from China, naturally) https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/mini-arcade-buttons?variant=40377171146
For my single octave keyboard I 3D printed the cable gland in TPU filament, with minimal success because I was just winging it. I had the dimensions all wrong and so a lot of hot glue had to save the day. Works ok but next time I’ll put a bit more effort in.
when i see all these joysticks it would make me want to do a module like that
http://familjenronnberg.se/~niklas/diy/eurorack/joystick/
but maybe I’m off topic ?
It’s pricey, but gorgeous and absolutely HUGE, but I got one of these indestructible beasts a couple of years ago - highly recommended:
There used to be a UK importer on Amazon, but not sure of availability these days.
Nice push in buttons, worth a punt just to see the quality / feel. I’ve got a strange little 4 way momentary microswitch switch unit from the Tornado aircraft box, may build a smaller joystick unit with it, together with the mini buttons. Sort of like a mini me version.
I do my prints with a Creality Ender-3, it’s a lot quieter than the old unit I used to have.
That’s on topic, controlling things with a joystick… is that one of those mini analogue thumb joysticks? I rather like the look of those, may build an analogue joystick unit for my C64.
Feck… that hooooge…(nice though!) I just couldn’t find anything from the usual places. It’s why I built my own.
I picked up the dual-stick version of this years and years ago - it was half price in a Maplin clearance thing, £50. (It was before I turned 30, and I’m heading towards 46.) Ended up ditching the PCB from it last year because it could only handle PS/2 keyboard connections and I didn’t have anything that could work with that, and started wiring it up with USB arcade board things. One day I’ll finish that as well 
I’ve got an Ender 3 Pro, it’s superb 
There was a Maplins here in Brighton, one of the guys that used to work there started his own shop up with a bunch of Maplins shelving and stock. Used to like popping along to see what deals they had, shame they shut down…
Having projects in the bank for a rainy day isn’t a bad thing, but when you start skinning your shins on them. 
They are, I looked and looked for a new 3D printer after my Prusa just really fell apart for the last time, and I got tired of having to upgrade all the time. That, and my other printer is just about the loudest one I ever heard. It’s a 3D systems Cube 3, but it is very accurate indeed… no heated bed though. I patched the firmware to get around the DRM on the material. May rebuild it with Ender electronics, steppers with a smaller step and a heated bed. It’s one of those future projects when everything else is done (yeh right…!)
Last year X-Arcade released a new PCB for the Tankstick that allows X-input as well. PCs see the stick (in that mode) as two X Box controllers.
I got the ‘Tri Mode’ PCB upgrade for about £30 iirc and it’s very simple to install.
Yeah, I saw that PCB but fancied going off piste
I still need to dial my printer in more, but doing a bit of post build fettling is ok, it is exercise for my hands. The button just turned up in the post… so next is the wiring part!
The blue really makes it pop against the black body 
What’s the plan for attaching a base?
