DIY Mixbox V2

This is version 2 of my DIY portable Mixbox

This is a followup to my previous post on the DIY Portable Mixbox.

This one was designed to meet similar criteria to the original, but to also provide the missing two action buttons. This makes playing some fighting games a bit easier as it means I can dedicate a button to moves that would otherwise require two buttons to be pressed at once. For example, in Mortal Kombat 11 you can throw your opponent by pressing A and X simultaneously on the Xbox Controller. Or you can press the Left Bumper button, which unfortunately is one of the buttons missing from a six button controller.

I also added another feature to support Mortal Kombat 11 play, which is a pair of buttons that can be held to turn Dpad presses into analogue stick moves, instead. For a future revision I’d like to also include a switch which can change the functionality of these buttons, so that they can instead become the L3 and R3 buttons. These are the ones you get on a normal controller if you press down on the Left or Right analogue sticks.

Following a suggestion from a Reddit poster, I went with Kailh Speed Silver switches for this controller. It doesn’t feel all that much different, but the buttons trigger with a shorter travel than the Red switches in the previous model.

If you’re thinking of printing your own controller from the files I’ve put on Thingiverse, you might want to edit them slighly to add a support for the Arduino controller. I had to prop mine up with some packing material to get it the right height within the case. The print still fits on the build plate of my AnyCubic i3 Mega S. This is why I moved the dpad and action buttons closer together.

The wiring was pretty tricky on this project. It’s not too hard to attach wires to the keyswitches, but there’s not much room for soldering directly to the headers on the arduino. I wanted to minimise the case depth, so I didn’t want to use connectors, such as Dupont Connectors.

Files are now available here on Thingiverse