Okay, so I’ve been messing around with this idea for a while: making a custom joystick specifically for volleyball video games. You know, something that feels a bit more… real than just mashing buttons. I finally got around to actually trying it out, so here’s how it went down.
First, I gathered all the junk I thought I’d need. This included:
- An old joystick I had lying around (it was pretty beat up, but the base was solid).
- Some random wires.
- A cheap microcontroller board I picked up online.
- A few buttons (for things like jump and dive).
- A soldering iron (and solder, obviously).
- My trusty laptop.
The Messy Part (aka Building It)
I started by ripping apart the old joystick. I basically just wanted the base and the stick itself. Everything else went in the trash.
Next, I wired up the microcontroller to the joystick’s potentiometers. This was a pain, honestly. Lots of tiny wires and fiddly connections. I think I burned myself twice. I looked up some wiring diagrams online,but every joystick is different. I just trial-and-error it.
Then, I mounted the extra buttons onto the base. I just drilled some holes and hot-glued them in place. Classy, I know.
After that, it was all about connecting the buttons to the microcontroller. More soldering. More tiny wires. More cursing.
The Brainy Part (aka Coding It)
Once the hardware was (mostly) done, I plugged the microcontroller into my laptop. Time for some code!
I used some basic Arduino code to read the inputs from the joystick and buttons. Then, I had to figure out how to translate those inputs into something the game would understand. This took a lot of Googling and experimenting.I looked up “joystick mapping” and that gave me some hints.
I wrote a simple program that basically said, “If the joystick is tilted this way, send this signal to the computer.” And so on for the other directions and the buttons.
Testing and Tweaking
Finally, the moment of truth! I fired up the volleyball game and… it kinda worked! The joystick moved the player, and the buttons did some of the things they were supposed to do.
But it was far from perfect. The controls were super janky, and some of the buttons didn’t register at all. So, I spent the next few hours tweaking the code, adjusting the sensitivity, and fixing the wiring on the buttons that weren’t working.
Eventually, I got it to a point where it was playable. It’s still not amazing, but it’s definitely more fun than using a regular controller. It feels more like I’m actually playing volleyball, even if it’s just in a virtual world. And I built the thing myself. That’s the fun part, right?
I want to add some vibration feedback and maybe make a better-looking enclosure at next step.
