As popular as the Nintendo Switch and its sequel are, it’s hard to argue that its click-on Joy-Con controllers are ergonomic, barring you having very uniquely shaped hands. This thought and a stack of Wii controllers led [KOUZEX] to the mad project of merging Joy-Cons and WiiMotes into what can affectionately be called Wii-Cons, or perhaps JoyMotes.
Suffice it to say that it’s not a very clean or easy mod, and you could definitely make the point that a custom PCB and 3D-printed shell would have been a lot easier. Making space for the Joy-Con’s side rail, thumb stick and PCB without simply tossing the WiiMote’s PCB was a tough ask, and these are two WiiMotes that will never connect to a Wii again.
With the WiiMote-shaped Joy-Cons working pretty well after all that work, the issue of remapping Joy-Con buttons that have no match on WiiMotes was probably the biggest headache. Here having said custom version could be rather helpful to have more control over the button layout, also to not have to keep harvesting the dwindling supply of WiiMotes to make WiiCons. It might even be possible to keep all the WiiMote functionality that way, to really blow people’s minds when you use your fancy Joy-Cons to next play a game on an original Wii.
Kouzex should have consulted you before acting, Maya.
I guess sometimes, early on in our hacking paths we are at a point where chopping things up is easier than designing things in CAD. Ideally, we all continue to progress beyond that point.
what do you mean bro? Nothing wrong with using proper CAD instead of half-wit solutions like Blender.
You are generally better off “chopping things up” for a first prototype than going straight to CAD – what seems like it will work in CAD inevitably doesn’t feel right in the hand, has a clearance issue you can’t see in CAD (usually wires being rather thicker and annoyingly prone to sitting in the wrong spot) etc etc. And half the time projects like this can be done well enough and vastly quicker with such methods anyway, so when you find you don’t want to make another after all…
i still use both. one of my favorite things about 3d printing is that i can chop something up with a knife or dremel or whateer, and then take measurements directly from it and use that in my openscad files. i.e., i can design around the inaccuracy of my original cuts.
Eh. I like Maya’s ideas too, but fabricating by “chopping things up” isn’t really inferior to designing with CAD, it’s simply a different set of skills with a different set of ideal use cases.
For a project like this, you can’t really avoid it entirely; even if you designed & built an entire functioning replica of the wiimotes using CAD, and a custom PCB for an interface, you’d still have to cannibalize a pair of switch 2 controllers and splice the two together somehow.