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Homemade Guitar Hero / Frets on Fire controller how to |
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Written by Stuyo
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Thursday, 10 January 2008 |
Page 2 of 8
Part 1 - The Beginning
The idea of building my own Guitar Hero controller came to me as soon as I played my first song in the game and realized how far from the real thing is to play with keyboard. The foundation of the project was already in my head from a previous one, which I never managed even to start, and begged to be applied to the current task. The components of the guitar were to be an old USB gamepad and some materials, laying around my home, and also would be easy to assemble and would require little time to be assembled. The next thing that came to my mind was, "There's no way that someone hasn't already got the same idea," and started thoroughly searching the net. I stumbled across enough information and gathered what i needed for my project. I found many ideas, which saved me great amount of planning and work. On the whole, I will not present something completely new and different on these pages, but rather will document in detail my take on the problem (I didn’t find detailed guide or worklog), as well as I will show my answer to the construction problems I faced while working.
The basic goal was to get something as close as possible to this at the end:
As I already mentioned, my goal was to use only scrap materials I had left from other projects. The "heart" of the controller was an old gamepad, I hadn't used for a long time:
The first thing, every self respecting modder has to do, is to disassemble the whole object, on which he works (at least from curiosity to see what is inside and to remove the extra parts):
One of the main problems were the fret buttons. They had to be comfortable, big, and most of all backlit. There was nothing suitable around, so I had to make them myself. I drew the basic concept for the buttons on a 6mm acrylic piece and the cutting began:
Of course, 6mm are obviously not enough. Roughly I decided that 12mm thick buttons will be exactly what I needed. So, I glued the buttons to another piece of 6mm acrylic:
And this is what I got at the end for buttons:
