Power Tools

Today marks the dawn of a new era in my life. That's right, I now own a power tool. A Ryobi drill to be exact. This actually came as part of a long list of items I decided I needed to purchase. Home Depot provided me with just about everything I was looking for and for once I didn't hate my experience there. I guess when you're actually excited about building something that store doesn't suck quite so much.

Building something I say?

That's right! And since you asked, I am building an arcade style joystick for the Xbox 360. Ever since Street Fighter IV came out it has been next to impossible to find any type of joystick; good or bad. They're all gone! Well, almost all gone. You can always pay a little extra and buy one from a seller on eBay, but why pay a little more for something I know I'm paying too much for when I can just pay a lot more for something that may not even work in the end? Exactly!

Anyway, the standard Xbox 360 controller is just about the worst controller you can find when it comes to playing fighting games. It has horrible precision, which makes executing most moves almost impossible. So I've had enough and I want a joystick. I've been researching like crazy this past week, learning everything I can about building joysticks. And let me tell you, the community is out there and the information is not hard to find. In no way will my joystick be as amazing as some of the ones posted over at the Joystick Vault, but for now I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that I can even get it to work.

Tools and materials. I'm just about ready to start building. Along with my drill, I purchased drill bits, two hole saws, screws, hinges, wood, Lexan (polycarbonate), a hand saw, sand paper, a soldering iron, solder (obviously), and a wire crimper. So far I've spent around $175 (yikes!), which is of course way more than if I had just bought an overpriced joystick on eBay. But the bulk of my purchase was tool related and those will come in handy as time goes by. Had I already owned most of the tools, this project would have been a bit more reasonable. Not to worry, I plan on making more than one joystick, so they'll only get less expensive as I go along.

What materials do I still need? Crafting-wise I still need wire, primer and spray paint. Then comes the actual joystick components. That will probably run around $100, which I'm not ecstatic about spending, but at this point there's really no turning back. I need to buy an Xbox 360 controller that I can take apart and use as the guts of the joystick. Then the most obvious components: buttons and the joystick. I'll probably also buy a bunch of "quick connects" which are extremely cheap and will minimize the amount of soldering that I'll need to do.

All in all, I'm thinking this is going to be pretty fun. I've never done such a crafty project, so I'm looking forward to it quite a bit. Stay tuned.