Tag Archives: DIY

Wake Up, Neo. Your Ring Is Playing the Matrix.

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Look at the Digital Rain Ring when the screen is off, and you might not immediately clock what you’re looking at. A clean silver bezel. A flat black face. Bold, architectural proportions that sit somewhere between a modern signet ring and a minimalist sculpture. It reads as jewelry, completely and confidently. Then the animation starts.

That double life is arguably the most deliberate design decision Daniel Idle made. The OLED display, sitting recessed behind a polished silver frame, does something that most tech-forward jewelry fails to pull off: it disappears when it’s not in use. The black glass of the screen at rest looks remarkably close to a dark stone setting, the kind of graphic, monochromatic face you’d expect on a considered piece of contemporary jewelry. It’s only when the Matrix rain animation loops across it that the object reveals its other identity.

Designer: Daniel Idle

The physical form took real thinking to get right. Looking at the CAD model, the ring measures approximately 21mm by 18mm across the face, with a total height of just over 25mm. Those proportions matter. The face is large enough to hold the display at a readable scale, but the tapered body connecting it to the band keeps the overall silhouette from reading as clunky. The geometry is almost architectural, widening from the band up toward the face in a way that gives the piece visual weight without making it feel like you’re wearing a small appliance on your finger.

The band itself is an open C-shape rather than a fully closed ring. It’s a practical call given the electronics that need to live inside the body, but it also lands well aesthetically, softening what is otherwise a very hard-edged, geometric form. From the side, the two components sit in good proportion to each other. Nothing feels like an afterthought.

The custom PCB is worth pausing on. It’s tiny, densely packed, and clearly built to exact dimensions to fit within the ring body. A flexible ribbon cable connects the board to the OLED display, and a USB-C port is integrated for charging. The fact that all of this infrastructure lives inside something you wear on your finger is genuinely impressive engineering, but Idle’s judgment was to make sure none of it is visible in the finished piece. That restraint is what separates this from a hobbyist build.

The prototype stage used a white resin body, which actually shows the concept quite clearly in a raw, honest way. You can see the display sitting flush with the face, the green animation already doing its work against the matte surface. But the shift to polished silver for the finished version was the right call. Silver gives the piece the visual language of jewelry rather than a prototype, and the contrast between the warm metal bezel and the deep black of the OLED screen is genuinely considered. It has the graphic confidence of a piece that was thought about as an object first and a technology project second.

The animation choice suits the form well too. The Matrix rain, those cascading columns of green katakana-inspired characters, fills a small square display naturally. It loops cleanly, it doesn’t demand to be read in detail, and its cultural weight does a lot of communicative work in a very compact space. “Wake up, Neo” appearing in green pixels on a silver ring is a complete sentence in the language of pop culture, and Idle clearly knows that.

What makes the Digital Rain Ring worth paying attention to is not the novelty of putting a screen on a ring. It’s the evidence that someone thought through the design consequences of doing so. The proportions hold up. The material choices are intentional. The off-state is as considered as the on-state. Most tech jewelry gets the technology right and the jewelry part wrong. This one seems to have gone in the other direction, starting with the object and working inward from there. That’s a harder problem to solve, and it’s the one that actually matters.

The post Wake Up, Neo. Your Ring Is Playing the Matrix. first appeared on Yanko Design.

Five Years, One Bowl, and a Woodturner Who Refused to Quit

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Most of us abandon a project after a few weeks of frustration. Olivier Gomis sat on one for five years, then came back and finished it. The Bowl Curved Pursuit is Gomis’s latest release, a handcrafted woodturning that looks, at first glance, like it was generated by some algorithmic design software rather than made by two hands in a workshop. The curves twist and rotate in a way that feels almost mathematically precise, each wood segment following the one before it in a pattern that spirals elegantly around the bowl’s body. It’s the kind of object that makes you look twice, then a third time, trying to work out how it was actually made. That’s kind of the point.

Gomis, a French woodturner and furniture maker, has been building a reputation for designs that sit right at the edge of what woodworking is supposed to look like. His work doesn’t whisper “rustic” or “farmhouse.” It says something closer to “sculpture” and means it. His portfolio spans coloured pencil vases, massive segmented bowls, and geometric pieces that wouldn’t look out of place in a contemporary design gallery. But the Curved Pursuit feels like a moment of arrival, a design he clearly couldn’t let go of until he got it right.

Designer Name: Oliveri Gomis

The process is deceptively methodical. Gomis built the bowl by gradually stacking and rotating wood pieces before cutting them on a table saw, then mounted the entire structure on a lathe and carved it into its final form. That sequence, stacking, rotating, cutting, turning, sounds simple enough until you consider how much precision is required at every stage. A miscalculation in the rotation angle and the whole pattern collapses into something ordinary. The five-year gap between conception and completion makes a lot more sense once you understand those margins.

What gets me about this bowl is how visible the thinking is. You can trace the logic of the design just by looking at it. The segments aren’t decorative afterthoughts, they’re structural decisions, each one informing the curve that follows. For a piece of functional decor, that’s a rare quality. Most objects in this category are either beautiful or interesting. The Curved Pursuit manages to be both, and does it without trying to explain itself.

The price sits at $372 USD, available to order on commission. That number might give some people pause, but I’d argue it’s almost suspiciously reasonable for what you’re getting. This isn’t a production piece pulled from a conveyor belt. It’s a hand-built object that required five years of problem-solving to even exist. Commissioning one means you’re essentially getting a slice of a very specific creative obsession, which is not something that ends up on most people’s shelves by accident.

There’s also a broader conversation happening here about craft in the age of mass production. We live at a moment when almost anything can be printed, extruded, or manufactured at scale, and yet the appetite for handmade objects keeps growing. Not out of nostalgia exactly, but out of a genuine desire to own something that carries a human fingerprint. Gomis’s work taps directly into that. His YouTube channel documents every step of his process with no shortcuts hidden, which is both a smart move and a generous one. Watching him work makes the finished objects more meaningful, not less. You come away from his videos understanding not just how a piece was made, but why it matters.

The Bowl Curved Pursuit is the kind of design that rewards attention. It doesn’t immediately give everything away. The more you sit with it, the more the geometry reveals itself, the precision, the patience, the particular stubbornness it takes to return to something after five years and finally decide it’s ready. Somewhere between design and craft, between art object and kitchen counter, Gomis has made something genuinely hard to categorize. If that sounds like a compliment, it is.

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This 60Hz E Ink Game Boy emulator refreshes retro gaming with an ESP32-powered handheld

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Retro gaming has inspired countless handheld recreations over the years, but most focus on replicating the original hardware with faster processors or modern conveniences. Wenting Zhang’s latest experiment takes a completely different route by pairing a classic Game Boy emulator with an E Ink display, an unlikely combination that overcomes one of the technology’s biggest limitations. Instead of accepting the sluggish refresh rates typically associated with E Ink, Zhang engineered a solution capable of delivering gameplay at a remarkably smooth 60Hz, creating a handheld that feels far more responsive than its paper-like screen would suggest.

The DIY project dubbed PaperBoy S3 is built around the discontinued M5Stack PaperS3 development kit. The compact board combines an ESP32-S3 dual-core microcontroller with a 4.7-inch 960 x 540 E Ink touchscreen, hardware originally intended for smart home controls, electronic labels, and educational projects rather than gaming. By transforming this inexpensive development platform into a functional Game Boy emulator, Zhang demonstrates just how much untapped potential still exists in low-power embedded hardware.

Designer: Wenting Zhang

Achieving playable performance required much more than simply running emulator software. Traditional E Ink displays rely on slow waveform updates that prioritize image quality over speed, making them unsuitable for fast-moving graphics. Zhang bypassed this limitation by taking advantage of PaperS3’s raw row-and-column display interface, allowing him to implement a custom driver that performs rapid partial screen refreshes. Instead of refreshing the entire display every frame, only the active gameplay area is updated, dramatically reducing latency while maintaining recognizable grayscale visuals.

The original Game Boy’s modest 160 x 144-pixel resolution also works in the project’s favor. Rather than driving the display at its full native resolution, the emulator scales the Game Boy image while processing only a small portion of the screen. Multiple frame buffers fit directly into the ESP32-S3’s SRAM, enabling much faster rendering than would otherwise be possible. Zhang also applies intelligent dithering techniques to recreate the Game Boy’s four shades of gray, preserving the familiar look of Nintendo’s iconic handheld on an E Ink panel.

The ESP32-S3’s dual-core architecture plays an important role in maintaining performance. One processor core is dedicated to Game Boy emulation while the other handles video rendering and audio tasks, pushing the inexpensive microcontroller close to its limits. Despite the constrained hardware, classic titles such as Pokémon Blue, Super Mario Land, and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening remain highly playable, proving that smooth retro gaming does not necessarily require powerful silicon.

PaperBoy S3 also includes several thoughtful quality-of-life features. Bluetooth controller support offers an alternative to touchscreen controls, while quick-save and quick-load functions make it easier to jump in and out of games. Audio remains the biggest compromise because the development board lacks dedicated sound hardware, forcing Zhang to rely on the built-in piezo buzzer to approximate the Game Boy’s music and sound effects. The results are far from perfect, but they remain recognizable enough to complement the nostalgic experience.

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This Solar Smartwatch Ran 9 Months on Battery, Then the Panel Kicked In

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The smartwatch category has a battery problem it can’t seem to shake. Despite years of incremental improvements, most wearables still need to be charged every day or two, which is exactly the opposite of what a watch is supposed to be. A watch is supposed to be on your wrist and working, not sitting on a charging pad because you forgot to plug it in before bed.

The LightInk is an attempt to solve that problem by going back to a design philosophy that worked decades ago: solar. The concept mimics the 90s solar digital watches that ran more or less indefinitely, but brings it into the present with an E-Ink display, an ESP32 microcontroller, WiFi, Bluetooth, LoRa radio, and a custom power management system built from scratch over several years.

Designer: Daniel Ansorregui

The project started in 2019 with a simple goal: build a solar-powered watch that could send LoRa packets to a receiver at home. After experimenting with early hardware and contributing display optimizations to the open-source Watchy project, the creator hit the limits of what off-the-shelf hardware could manage and built a custom PCB around a TPS63900 buck-boost converter, running the watch at 2.7V.

The biggest technical hurdle turned out to be the microcontroller itself. The ESP32 takes 28ms to boot, consuming around 1mA of current in the process, and that cycle was responsible for about 60% of the watch’s total power draw without contributing anything to the actual display update. The solution was to skip normal boot entirely and run code directly from the ESP32’s RTC memory via a wake stub.

That required reimplementing SPI communication from scratch within the RTC memory constraints, since no code outside that space can run during the stub phase. The payoff was significant: the entire boot, data send, and display update sequence now completes in under 1ms. Once the display is refreshed, the ESP32 immediately returns to deep sleep, saving an additional 1mA that would otherwise be consumed during light sleep.

The result is a watch that runs for six to 10 months on a 100mAh battery, which is already an unusual number for a device this capable. Add the solar panel, similar in type to the kind found on pocket calculators, and the power equation starts to tilt toward indefinite. One hardware revision ran for nine months on battery alone before being retired for a newer build.

The 1.54-inch E-Ink display helps keep those numbers achievable. Electrophoretic displays only draw power when changing states and hold their image indefinitely without any power at all, which makes them an obvious fit for a watch face that updates once per minute rather than 60 times per second. Touch controls via the ESP32’s built-in capacitive touch capability handle navigation, making physical buttons unnecessary and allowing for a more compact case.

The watch supports WiFi, Bluetooth, and LoRa via a Wio-SX1262 radio module, and GPS can be added as an optional component, though the creator notes it wasn’t a particularly good idea given the space and power it consumes. The case is 3D printed in two pieces and accepts any standard 22mm wristband. Everything, including the firmware, PCB schematics, and case files, is open source and available on GitHub.

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The Piano Key Holder Where Every Press Clicks Out a Hidden Brass Hook

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Key hooks by the door are one of those things that somehow manage to be both boring and insufficient. The options range from plain metal rails to the kind of decorative wooden boards that start out charming and quickly fade into background noise. Nobody has really questioned whether a key holder can be interactive, or whether hanging your keys could actually be the best part of coming home.

This wooden piano key holder turns that mundane act into something that rewards the hand that does it. Built primarily from solid wood and mounted on the wall, it looks like a short section of a piano keyboard, down to the contrast between pale white keys and raised dark notes. Each white key hides a brass hook inside, and pressing one causes that hook to click out from the bottom.

Designer: Inventive Robin

The mechanism inside is the centerpiece. Each latching unit is machined from sheet acetal and assembled with metal dowels and standoffs, translating the vertical press of a piano key into the outward extension of a brass hook. Press the same key again, and the hook retracts with another click. That tactile feedback is what separates this from any peg or rail that simply sits on the wall, doing nothing memorable.

Three materials carry the weight of the aesthetic. The base and outer frame are cherry, machined on a CNC router to house the acetal mechanisms inside. The white keys are individually shaped pieces of maple, and between them sit the raised black notes in a contrasting darker wood. The hooks are small, architectural brass clips, machined separately and fitted to the mechanism that drives them up and down.

The piano keyboard format is a natural fit for a key holder, and not just because of the pun. A row of regularly spaced, independently pressable keys maps almost perfectly onto a row of hooks, and the visual language of a piano is familiar enough that anyone walking past it understands what those keys do, even without being told there’s a mechanism hiding underneath.

What makes it work as wall decor is how cleanly the materials read together. The warm cherry frame, the pale maple keys, and the dark raised notes create a contrast that fits comfortably in a living room entryway without demanding too much attention. The brass hooks, small and architectural in their proportions, don’t look like hardware until you know what to press.

Key holders have always had a quiet design problem. They ask you to form a new habit, redirecting an automatic reach toward something deliberately placed on a wall, and there’s usually nothing to make that effort feel worthwhile. Giving the hook a mechanical click is a small but effective way to make the ritual feel intentional, which is the kind of encouragement that actually makes the habit stick.

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A Solo Korean Maker Just Built the Writing Device Your Phone Isn’t

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There’s a whole category of people who want to write but can’t quite get there on the devices they already own. The laptop opens, and the browser tab is there. The phone unlocks, and three notifications are already demanding attention. Writing apps exist on every platform, but so does everything else, and that proximity makes sustained focus harder than it should need to be. The answer that the market usually offers is another app, which is the same problem wearing a different hat.

The Micro Journal Rev.6.1 comes at that problem from a different direction entirely. It’s a handmade, clamshell writing device built by a solo maker in South Korea, designed for exactly one purpose: opening the lid and writing. There’s no operating system to navigate, no notifications to dismiss, and no browser to wander into. The device boots instantly and drops you directly into a writing canvas, the way a paper notebook would if notebooks could sync to Google Drive.

Designer: Un Kyu Lee (Background_Ad_1810)

The origin story matters here. The Rev.6 that preceded this model was built in response to a playwright from New York who wanted a device compact enough for cafés and distinctive enough to be proud of. The Rev.6.1 takes that same concept, the same 48-key hot-swappable keyboard and color IPS display, and folds it into a clamshell form that closes flat and slips easily into a bag. Community members who received early units called it a “beautiful final evolution” of the Rev.6 concept, which says something about how iterative this product line actually is.

The keyboard uses Kailh hot-swap sockets compatible with Cherry MX switches, which means you choose the switches that match how you like to type and swap them whenever that preference changes. The 48-key layout ships with two additional hidden layers available for remapping, giving far more input flexibility than the key count alone would suggest. It’s a small but considered detail that treats the physical act of typing as something worth getting right.

Files sync to your personal Google Drive over Wi-Fi, with no subscription fee and no middleman service to depend on. An 18650 rechargeable battery handles power, charging over USB-C, which covers the same standard you’re already carrying everywhere else. The whole device is assembled by hand after each order is placed, which adds a few days to the delivery window but also means each unit comes with a degree of personal investment that mass-produced products rarely carry.

The Rev.6.1 sits in a growing ecosystem of writerDeck devices, which are purpose-built writing machines that the community around them treats more like tools than toys. Compared to polished products like the Freewrite, the Micro Journal is more openly a handcrafted object, with visible maker-culture DNA in its design and ethos. That’s not a limitation; it’s the point, and for anyone who already feels the appeal of a mechanical keyboard or a distraction-free tool, the logic lands fairly quickly.

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This Free 3D Lamp Has 300 LEDs and Looks Nothing Like a Printed Object

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Decorative lighting has become one of the more satisfying corners of the maker movement. Most off-the-shelf lamp designs don’t bring much that’s genuinely distinctive into a space, and the ones that do tend to cost far more than the task deserves. That’s pushed a growing number of people toward building their own, using 3D printing and open-source lighting firmware to create objects that simply wouldn’t exist any other way.

The Cyber Loop Lamp is the kind of result that tends to stop people mid-scroll. It takes the shape of a vertical wheel, somewhere between a car’s rim and a navigation pin laid flat, and wraps that form in a layered lighting system that creates an infinity-like depth effect. The files are available for free on MakerWorld, and building one is a genuinely demanding project.

Designer: LightCore3D

At approximately 25cm tall, the lamp has enough presence to anchor a desk corner without overwhelming it. The design uses colored filament for the outer shell and clear filament for a transparent inner diffuser layer. That separation between the light source and the outer shell produces the glowing, almost holographic depth that makes the lamp look so unlike anything that came off a 3D printer.

The lighting system draws from nearly 300 individually addressable RGB LEDs, packed into a 2m WS2812B strip running at 144 LEDs per meter. Three distinct zones handle the display: a central funnel, the outer perimeter ring, and roughly a dozen inner spokes. Each zone runs its own color and effect independently, giving the lamp that layered, animated quality that holds attention in a way static ambient lighting usually doesn’t.

Control comes from an ESP32 board running WLED firmware, which lets you map each LED zone to its own effects group and cycle through custom presets. WLED is open-source and widely supported, with a large built-in animation library and enough room to create your own sequences on top. The entire system draws from a 5V, 6A power supply, relatively modest for something delivering this amount of visual output.

Getting there takes real commitment. The model spans 12 print plates with an estimated print time of roughly 35 hours, and that’s before assembly begins. Soldering is required, and components like resistors and capacitors join the LED strip and controller in the electronics stack. The creator is upfront that the assembly process isn’t fully documented, so some steps will require problem-solving on the fly rather than following a defined guide.

That friction is part of what makes the result feel earned. A lamp that takes 35 hours to print and several more to assemble isn’t something you’d put together casually, which means it carries weight as an object in the room beyond what any store-bought light could. It sits at a desk or shelf and reads as something deliberately built for exactly the space it occupies.

The Cyber Loop Lamp lands in that unusual territory between a functional accent light and something closer to a display piece, the kind of object that draws questions from people in a room before they figure out what it even is. The model is free on MakerWorld, and the full bill of materials is available directly from the project page for anyone ready to commit to the build.

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This 3D-Printed Macintosh Replica Is Actually a Voice AI Assistant

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Smart speakers have become some of the most visually forgettable objects in modern homes. A cylinder, a puck, a fabric-wrapped drum, placed wherever the Wi-Fi is strong and largely invisible once the novelty wears off. They do their jobs well enough, but none of them look like they belong in a collection or on a desk that someone cares about. The hardware has always been purely functional, and the design has always shown it.

Alisher Ashimov approached the idea of a desk-based AI assistant from a completely different direction. Kira, his open-source project, takes its visual cues directly from the original 1984 Macintosh, a machine whose beige monolith silhouette is arguably the most iconic in personal computing history. The result is a voice-activated AI companion that looks more like a cherished collectible than a utility device.

Designer: Alisher Ashimov

The enclosure is 3D printed in a single recommended filament color: Light Khaki matte PLA, the closest approximation of that distinctive Apple beige. Rounded top corners, a recessed front panel, horizontal side vents, and a decorative floppy-drive-style slot below the display all reproduce the original’s proportions at pocket scale, somewhere around 80mm wide. A small four-color badge on the lower front panel adds the final recognizable touch.

Where the original Macintosh showed a desktop environment, Kira shows a face. The 1.5-inch OLED display renders two rectangular eyes and a small dash mouth, animating expressively in response to interaction. The wake word is “Hey, Kira,” and from there, a built-in microphone picks up questions while a 4Ω, 3W speaker delivers spoken answers through the sculpted housing. It handles everyday voice queries the same way any smart assistant does, just with considerably more personality sitting on the shelf.

The electronics are deliberately approachable. The core is a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense, a capable and compact microcontroller with built-in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a microphone. The rest of the bill of materials, a speaker, amplifier, SH1107 OLED module, mini breadboard, and jumper wires, are available on Amazon for modest amounts. The 3D-printed enclosure is optimized to print in about three hours across two plates with minimal support material, and an assembly guide walks builders through wiring, assembly, and firmware flashing.

The software carries the same open-ended spirit as the hardware. Voice, language, the assistant’s character, and memory settings are all user-definable, which means Kira isn’t locked into a single personality or a single cloud service. Tinkerers can tune the firmware directly. Ashimov has published the files freely, with no commercial barriers between the design and anyone with a printer and an afternoon to spare.

The objects people choose to keep on their desks tend to say something about them. A tiny Macintosh-shaped AI assistant that you built yourself and tuned to your own preferences says rather a lot. It combines a piece of design history, a genuinely capable voice interface, and an honest invitation to understand exactly how the thing works, all in a form that most people will stop and ask about the moment they see it.

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This $172 Raspberry Pi Handheld Doubles as a USB Keyboard

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The Raspberry Pi Compute Module has always been more useful as a component than as a standalone board. Stripped of the standard ports that make the full-size Pi easy to reach, the CM5 was designed to disappear into purpose-built hardware, doing exactly what a system needs it to do in exactly the space available. That modularity invites projects, and Pi handheld computers have been a natural expression of it for years. Most of them never quite cross the line from capable experiment to genuinely polished device.

The piBrick Pocket-CM5 is an open-source hardware project that comes significantly closer than most. Built from a custom PCB designed for manufacturing at JLCPCB, a 3D-printed shell, and a parts list that totals around $172, it lands at smartphone proportions, 80mm x 145mm x 19.6mm, with the kind of feature density that makes it credible as a daily carry tool rather than a desk ornament.

Designer: Ahmad Amarullah

The display is a 3.92-inch AMOLED panel running at 1080 × 1240 pixels and 90Hz, with 560 nits of brightness and capacitive multitouch for up to five fingers. A custom Asahi Tempered Glass cover sits over the top, which is the kind of detail that separates a considered design from a prototype that happens to work. Full-size and micro-HDMI outputs mean the same device can drive an external display, when a keyboard and mouse are more useful than a pocket-sized one.

That keyboard is a BBQ20, a compact QWERTY design with an integrated trackpad derived from the BlackBerry layout. Side rotary encoders and five user-programmable buttons extend the input options beyond a standard phone form factor, giving the device a tactile depth that touchscreen-only handhelds don’t have. The battery is a 5,000mAh LiPo, and the USB port set covers both USB 3 and USB 2 in Type-A and Type-C configurations, plus an internal expansion header for add-on modules.

One of the more quietly useful features sits at the intersection of the keyboard and the USB stack. The BBQ20 can operate in USB-HID mode, which means plugging the piBrick into any external computer or server turns its keyboard and trackpad into a fully functional USB input device, independent of the Pi. A sysadmin arriving at a server rack without a spare keyboard doesn’t need to find one; the piBrick already is one. That framing, as a tool for engineers and sysadmins rather than simply a hobbyist novelty, runs through the whole project.

A full Linux desktop runs on the CM5, alongside the system administration and networking tools that tend to be useful in those situations. NVMe SSD support in 2230 or 2242 formats adds storage headroom when the SD card isn’t enough. Stereo speakers, a microphone, and an optional camera module round out a spec sheet that covers more ground than the form factor suggests. The project files, schematics, and build instructions are all available as open source, which means the $172 cost is the floor, not a retail price, and the design itself belongs to anyone who wants to build on it.

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DIYer turns tiny GameCube keychain into a fully-functional controller

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Controllers come in all shapes and sizes, depending on the gamers’ needs, and most importantly, their holding comfort. Things get really interesting as a lot of big tech companies invest a lot of effort in designing a one-size-fits-all controller, which holds good for long gaming sessions. While most controllers are more or less the same size, there’s always that element of curiosity for accessories that are radically different from the standard proportions.

YouTuber Crux, who’s known for interesting creations with an infusion of gaming, has crafted a mini controller out of pure curiosity. Having got the Backpack Buddies GameCube controller keychain, he asked himself the question – can this be turned into a functional controller? That led to this interesting DIY project that is as intricate as things can get, since the maker is dealing with the super small size of things.

Designer: Crux

We all have keyrings in some form or another, and these cute little accessories evoke the feeling – what if these were functional? The DIYer addresses this curiosity with the functional GameCube controller keychain that looks extremely satisfying as it takes shape. Since he was dealing with very small proportions here, the rotary motor tool does the trick of shaving off the extra bit on the inside of the keychain controller to make space for all the electronics. To put together the intricate joysticks, D-Pad, and other buttons, the DIYer goes down the 3D printing lane. Of course, the button controls and the joysticks had to be mounted on a sturdy base on the inside; that’s why Crux goes for the surface-mount tactile switches.

The DIY progresses with splitting the two controller halves and making up the necessary space to fit the electronics. The ultra-thin enameled wires connect the different components to the Waveshare RP2040-Zero microcontroller board, which is programmed with firmware that makes the cute little keychain gamepad act like a native GameCube controller. The final step involved salvaging the wire and plug from the real controller and attaching it to the output ports. Once everything is in place, it’s time to connect the controller to the port and enjoy some gaming. He demonstrates a session of Fortnite and then moves to Mario Kart Wii. All the inputs work as intended, and you just wish this thing were available to grab right away.

If you manage to check out the complete video till the end, Brux hints at more keychain projects in the future. These include the SNES controller, N64 controller, and 3DS controller, which are absolutely cool. Somehow, if he can manage a wireless keychain controller DIY, that would be sublime.

The post DIYer turns tiny GameCube keychain into a fully-functional controller first appeared on Yanko Design.