How I Made my own Arduino based Controller

 This is my first blog and this is so smooth to type, I just love it.

Anyway, this blog is about something that i made in the previous week. You see, I had an arduino lying around cause I had purchased it out of curiosity and also a bunch of wires, and buttons, and whatnot.

But when I saw this video by Sebastian Lague about him making a console with an arduino, I thought I could do the same.

This was an awesome idea, but i didn't have any led displays like he did. So, I decided to make something even better - A console which can connect to my pc and let me play any game that my heart desires.

This was not an easy task, but I researched a lot and came across an instructables page, which explained how to do this exact same thing in practice. But, after reading it through, i found out that the arduino UNO, which I currently had, is not the best version of arduino to do this.

But, there was a way out. I would need to write a script that would detect keypresses from the arduino, and then, manually, map them to specific keys on the keyboard. Then, when a specific button on the arduino is pressed, some key on the keyboard would be simulated, and this was done by the awesome work done by the java library, Robot (I love this so much :)). 

This is not the best solution, but after implementing it, I doubted that 2 layers between the button pressing and the simulation of keypress would not be that fast. But boy, was I wrong! It was so responsive, I thought I had an actual controller in my hands! This was working, I tried it on a couple of games, namely Hollow Knight, A short Hike, INSIDE and Ori and the Blind Forest (BTW, I love indie and platformer games a lot). 

This was my first hardware project and I'am still working on it to make it look pretty (It is just a bunch of buttons and a joystick on a cutout paper right now).

Thanks for reading, and I will update this post as soon as a finish putting the whole thing into an empty mobile case :)).

Peace