Can you believe that [Tom Tilley]’s wife was just going to pawn off this perfectly good salad spinner on the thrift store when it’s so ripe for hacking? We couldn’t, either. Fortunately, he caught it just in time, right before dinner.
One of the coolest things a person can do that also tends to aid gameplay is to make a custom controller. [Tom] decided to make one for Bust-A-Move, a simple game where one shoots balls at bubbles in order to pop them. It looks like quite the fun little stress reducer. Anyway, a simple game deserves a simple controller, no? Yes.
As you’ll see in the build/demo video below, [Tom] started with a standard wireless mouse and hot-glued a cardboard origami creation to it. This goes upside-down inside the salad spinner and gets connected to the spinner part so that the entire origami moves in a circle. [Tom] then extended the left mouse button to a switch, which he affixed to the outside.
This controller re-uses a slightly modified mouse that [Tom] used in a previous Bust-A-Move controller. He is using a FreePIE script and vJoy in order to map mouse movements to the joystick inputs expected by the game. Watch [Tom] bust some moves after the break.
