 Today we're going to be continuing with our project of this game controller. First things first, I want to blow it off with compressed air, get all the little pieces of sawdust off it before I spray paint it with this metallic paint, which should make it look like metal, since this is supposed to be a command center for my daughter's space station. So let me pop out the little screen that I put in here last time and get the compressed air going. I'm not only going to blow the air off on this, I'm going to blow off my workshop and get everything clean and ready for painting. Two little pieces of scrap wood kind of line down the middle, and you might be wondering what are these? Well, they come in very handy if you have little kids with small hands who like to play cards, because they can't hold the cards in their hands very well, but now they have little card holders for when they're playing games. Not only cheap, but I like to use every little scrap of wood that I can, and this works great for my daughter, and as my son gets older he'll need one, or if my daughter has friends over to play. But yeah, instead of throwing away little scraps of wood, you can just cut a line right down the middle and you have little card holders. Let's go and check on our spray paint. So our project's coming along, looking pretty good. I'm one of those people who I don't plan out every step of a project, I kind of make it up as I go along. So at this point I'm going to do something I probably should have done before, which is actually start working on the bottom here. I still don't know if I'm going to put the bottom on hinges or just nail it in. You know, I'm hoping once I get the electronics in there that they're where they're supposed to be and I shouldn't have to work on it, but at the same time I need to measure out the wood to fit on here, and I'm probably going to end up sanding it to match so they have a nice smooth finish on it, which means I'm probably going to have to re-spray some of this edge here. Not a big deal. So let's go ahead, I'm just going to grab this piece of wood and measure out and cut the pieces for the bottom. After that we can start putting the electronics in here. So as I mentioned in the previous videos, besides just doing a basic game controller, I thought I'd make it a little more unique by adding a little dot matrix screen here. So I have this dot matrix hooked up to an ESP8266, and if you follow my channel I've talked about this a lot, I've shown you a little bit of it, and I'm not going to go into a whole lot of detail on how this set up works right now because I have a series coming up that talks about all types of displays, including this, but the reason I'm using this is because it's just a basic Arduino or some other microcontrollers that this has obviously built in Wi-Fi. Now, when I first start this up, it's going to start displaying a message. Well, first it's going to connect to my local Wi-Fi, and then it's going to start displaying a message. Now, since this game controller is for my daughter and it's supposed to be a space control center or spaceship center, wherever you want to call it, the default message is my daughter's name, which is Ember, to Mission Control. So it'll just automatically start scrolling that. But again, I'm using the ESP here for Wi-Fi capability. So with anything that's connected to my local network that has a web browser or can do basic HTTP requests, I can send a basic command to it, such as that, and the message will change. Now it says, this is cool. That's what it should say. Yeah, there we go. This is cool. So I can program it. I can be watching her play games. I can send different messages to her. I can program the computers that she's playing games on to send messages to it and it can display whatever message I want. Now, right now, I'm powering this off just a cell phone charger. It takes five volts in, but I don't want to have two power cords coming out of this. I want to power it all through USB. And I don't want to have two USB ports coming out either. But the board for our game controller does have some extra pins and one of them is labeled five volts. So I'm wondering, I'm thinking I can get five volts off of that. And instead of using the USB port on the development board, there are VIN inputs on here so I can connect directly straight to this. So that's what I'm going to try doing now. I'm going to try connecting that and hopefully I don't fry my board. So it's this top pin here. This connection says five volts. So, and I'm not using all these connections. So let's see if I can get five volts out on that. So I got my multimeter. Now, right now, this is the plug that normally, right? Whoops. This is the plug that will normally go to the computer for USB. Right now I just have it plugged into a cell phone charger for power. But here we go. I'm going to test this. And I am getting five volts right there. And the pin on the left seems to be the positive charge. So I'm going to go ahead and wire that into the ESP and see if I can get it to work. I don't see why it wouldn't. Okay, so I didn't have any of these two pin connectors. So I just used single pin female to female jumper wires. And I'm going directly into the ESP8266 here. And it seems to be powering it just fine. I'm still not sure 100% how I'm going to mount the ESP inside the board because it does have mounting holes, but it has these pins there in the way. Now I might mount it facing down so the pins are up. That might work. And if not, I'll just use female to male connectors and put the board on this little breadboard here and mount the breadboard. But it is working. I'm getting power, one power line in through USB. And then to the ESP. Now, since these aren't the proper connections, they feel fairly secure, but I might put some hot glue there just to make sure those connections don't come loose once I close up the box. Glue some stuff instead of screwing in there mainly because I didn't have screws small enough to screw those components in plus just ease of use. We have our screen going here. It says Ember to Mission Control. And if I click on my cell phone here, it's going to now change to Films by Chris, which is my website, but I can send any message I want from my cell phone, desktop computer, laptop computer, using a web browser or WGET or Curl. Right now I'm only hooked to USB power and I hooked up to a computer just to chest the lights because these are light up LED buttons. So power's going in them. Next test, before I put the back on, I want to hook this up to a computer and make sure that all the buttons are being sent as a game controller. So here we go. I got Tomorrow Brothers three hooked up. And here's the controller. Little dot matrix screen's working. Go ahead and hit start and start playing. I've already programmed these keys into the emulator and now I can start playing. So any game that takes an arcade controller, I should be able to set up with this as long as the keys are programmed because I didn't use standard setup with this. So the default A's and B's may not be right, but pretty much any game that takes a game controller, you should be able to program it. And if not, if it uses a keyboard, you can always program a game controller or work as a keyboard. So this theoretically will work with any computer game. Keep in mind that this joystick is not pressure sensitive. It's like clicking a button and you can hear it. So there's no, you know, you wouldn't want to use this for a flight simulator that needs that fine tune moving, but any old arcade game this will work great for. I only put four game buttons on here. So like a game like Street Fighter, usually you have six. I could have put more, but it's kind of isn't needed for the games my daughter's gonna play. Plus I'm gonna be designing games for her specifically. And that is it. So yeah, and again, this little screen is controlled through HTTP request. If I do write a game, I can have certain parts of the game send messages to that screen. So she can be flying a spaceship and if she gets anything because they power up or whatever I want the game to send to it. So it's great. So now all I have to do is go ahead and put the back panel on because everything seems to be working. And I'm very pleased with the final product. So that's it. Thank you for watching. I hope you enjoyed this series. If you enjoy hardware stuff, especially when it comes to electronics, continue watching my channel. Just be sure to subscribe, like, share, comment, all that stuff helps me out. If you enjoy all my videos, think about coming to support over at patreon.com, that's patreon.com, forward slash metal X1000. There should be a link in the description as well as a link to my website, filmsbychrist.com. That's Chris with a K, which is how I spell my name. And there you can search the videos from both my sites. This is my hardware channel, I'm sorry, both my channels. This is my hardware channel. I also have a channel that I've been doing for years on software, mostly on programming and stuff like that. Have I think over 2,000 videos on that channel. So be sure to check it out. Some of the other ones, the quality isn't the best, but they're still informative. So yeah, all I have to do now is I'm just gonna nail the back on here. I'm not gonna put any hinge on here for some reason I need to get in here. Hopefully I don't. I can just cut this up, put as a minimal number of nails in here as possible. So that's it. Thanks for watching. And as always, I hope that you have a great day.