My original plan for my custom controller was to whittle a block of wood to resemble a Wii nunchuck, and use an Arduino mini to wire up a joystick and connect it to my Unity game. Unfortunately, this goal hit many snags in the process. The first was creating the shape with the tools I had available to me.

I had very little experience whittling, and I quickly found certain shapes and gouges to be difficult to create. I decided to scrap the piece I had begun and use a friend’s woodshop to start over. I used a larger piece of wood, in order to get a more comfortable size for the end result, and sketched out the initial shape. Using a bandsaw, I cut out the shape and then sanded it down with a belt sander.

This resulted in a good shape to start with; it was comfortable to hold and the size fits well in my hand. I cut the piece in half horizontally using the bandsaw, in order to gouge out the middle with a Dremel tool to create room for the internal hardware. From there I used a drill press to create a hole for the joystick and attempted to smooth it out with some better whittling tools. Unfortunately, I ended up chipping it in the process.

At this point, I had a pretty decent controller base, but I was unable to get the proper parts to finish it. I had ordered a joystick, an Arduino Mini, and a few other pieces of hardware, but they have yet to be delivered. The electronics sites I use to order pieces like this tend to have long and unpredictable delivery times, so I should have prepared better and planned the controller for hardware that I had already obtained. I did create a test version using the much larger Arduino Uno, but there’s no way it could fit inside the controller. The end result is a couple of disjointed pieces that, given the right materials, could be connected into a neat 1-handed controller. I’d love to start this over completely from scratch in the future, as I learned a lot about the process and I believe I’d be very happy with it, knowing some better practices and what to avoid.