Mission

I recently found myself with a surplus of Adafruit Industries components, I decided to put a few of them to good use by making a custom NES controller.

Objectives

• Use a thru-hole 5-way navigation switch.
• Use some square tactile buttons.
• Create a custom Eagle device for the navigation switch.
• Use a strip of SMD 0603 10k resistors.
• Use a single-sided 65×65 MM square board (since I have a bunch of them).

Design

The design is fairly simple, the only difference between it and a standard controller would be the use of the Center pin on the navigation switch as the Select button.

PCB

I had to resort to using quite a lot of jumper wires since the board is pretty small, it should also work fine on a double sided board (just not very efficiently).

Replace the bottom layer (blue lines) with jumper wire.

Results

The controller works great! Though it could use some routing to make it more comfortable.

Back – Start Button

Front

Use