Ergonomic RetroPie Arcade Controller

thingiverse

As someone who grew up at the dawn of the video arcade craze in the 70s and 80s, I've always craved to relive those old gaming experiences. With RetroPie, Mame, and Raspberry Pi now making it super cheap and easy to do, that's finally a reality! So naturally, I went on the hunt for a nice arcade controller for my Raspberry Pi and soon discovered upperpininsulaplastics' excellent "Ultimate Retropie Joystick Controller" (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2771521). This model was almost perfect, but when I printed one out, it turned out to be a bit chunkier than I really wanted. So, I figured I'd take my own shot at it and came up with this. My requirements were: * It had to match an authentic full-size arcade controller layout as closely as possible. * It had to fit on my Ender 3 (meaning any single piece couldn't be larger than the 220x220mm bed size). * It needed a comfortable place for me to rest my right palm. * It had to work with RetroPie, but it didn't need to contain a Raspberry Pi. I'd use my own case for that. The reason I didn't need it to contain a Raspberry Pi was that I already had a nice Raspberry Pi case (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:604915) and wanted to keep the Raspberry Pi close to the TV so I wouldn't have to worry about stringing an HDMI cable and power cable across the room. What you see here is the design I came up with. I've also included the original Fusion 360 project that I used to create it, so you can tinker with it if you want to. Note that this isn't a remix of upperpininsulaplastics' design - while I took some inspiration from that, I started completely from scratch on this one. The controller layout is an actual layout used on Sega arcade machines. Specifically, this one https://www.slagcoin.com/joystick/layout/sega1_s.png which I found on this page here: https://www.slagcoin.com/joystick/layout.html. I knew I wouldn't have room for all eight finger buttons on the top, but I figured there would be room for six and the last two could be mounted on either side, perfect for pinball sims! In order to make room for my palm to rest on the top, I rotated the layout counter-clockwise from the joystick. I figured that with the stick in line with my left hand, I'd naturally hold my right hand in that position anyway and, as it turns out, I was right. It's super comfortable this way. In keeping with the more ergonomic theme, I tilted the top five degrees forward which allowed me to slim down the case quite a bit. The case fits pretty much any of the standard arcade button USB kits available online. I chose Amazon's Choice Hikig 2 Player kit found here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07JFXQSM5 but pretty much any similar kit would do. One tip I have is to number all of the button connectors using tabs made with masking tape. That makes it easy to make sure that you assemble it the same way each time. If you're making more than one controller and if your kit is anything like mine, you'll want to be sure you wire both controllers in exactly the same way since RetroPie will recognize them both as the same type of controller and use the same button mapping for both of them. To assemble it, you'll want 4 short (~4mm long) 3mm screws to hold down the PCB and 4 larger screws and nuts for the joystick. I used #10-32 3/4in flat head phillips machine screws since I live in the states and they were easily available but I'm sure you could find equivalent metric screws pretty easily.