Large NES Controller Made From LEGOs

LEGO NES Controller

If LEGO are cool, and abnormally large NES controllers are cool, then what [Baron von Brunk] has created is pretty dang cool. It’s a super large functional NES game controller…. made out of LEGO! Yes, your favorite building blocks from the past (or present) can now be use to make an unnecessarily large game controller.

lego-nes-internalsThe four main sides of the controller case are standard stacked grey LEGO bricks. The inside of the case is mostly hollow, only with some supporting structures for the walls and buttons. The top is made from 4 individual LEGO panels that can be quickly and easily removed to access the interior components. The large LEGO buttons slide up and down inside a frame and are supported in the ‘up’ position care of some shock absorbers from a Technic Lego set. The shocks create a spring-loaded button that, when pressed down, makes contact with a momentary switch from Radio Shack. Each momentary switch is wired to a stock NES controller buried inside the large replica. The stock controller cord is then connected to an NES-to-USB adapter so the final product works with an NES Emulator on a PC.

[Baron von Brunk] is no stranger to Hackaday or other LEGO projects, check out this lamp shade and traffic light.

[via Instructables]

19 thoughts on “Large NES Controller Made From LEGOs

  1. Thanks for the shout-out! I’m actually looking to showcase this titanic brute at a forthcoming video game convention in Northern New Jersey this fall. First things first, I’m going to upgrade the inner circuits to be run by Arduino!

      1. Thank you! This was actually one of my first electronics projects to be integrated into LEGO bricks, thus my technical skills at the time were shoddy (I built this NES controller throughout 2012). Since then, I’ve been tinkering a lot more with microcontrollers and Arduini codes, hence I plan on making major upgrades to this! Here’s the updated 2015 article to chronicle the history of the model:

        http://baronvonbrunk.com/2015/?page_id=490

    1. For the LEGO structure, I probably spent upwards to $1,000 or so on pieces. I built the bulk of the project at a point in history when I was working at a job I really hated, and to keep me from quitting, my old boss gave me a huge pay raise — thus I had plenty of money to spend on making it! The official LEGO Stores can actually sell you individual boxes of a single color/type for $70, which have about 700-1,000 pieces per box (depending on size). When making this, I bought six boxes of light grey LEGO pieces, mainly 1×4 and 2×4 bricks. The roof was the most difficult part: I used hundreds of tile pieces, which can get rather expensive.

  2. Made from LEGO!

    My wall is made from concrete, not my wall is made from concretes.
    My wall is made from LEGO, not my wall is made from LEGOS

    My wall is made from concrete blocks
    My wall is made from Lego blocks/bricks.

  3. A giant NES controller is cool.
    I would recommend going ahead with the arduino or custom circuity.
    As it stands right now, based on the pictures, this is just a LEGO case mod that uses an NES controller at its core.
    Take it a step further with an open protocol, that will allow you to use it with anything (switch between an NES and DirectInput, etc).

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