Some of you may remember when we talked about this absolutely wild controller from the same mad lad
who built a DIY steam deck out of a framework laptop.
Well, at that time, no one knew that an official Steam Controller 2 was on the horizon.
So one man, Tommy B, did what Valve wouldn't and DIYed his own Steam Controller 2.
And guess what? He's here with us today!
That is so cool, but I gotta ask you, how awkward is it that Valve went and released an official Steam Controller 2 after you did all this work?
I wouldn't say it's awkward. First off, I think this was a great learning experience for me.
I learned so much about how controllers work and different wireless protocols and like building a trackpad from scratch.
Second, I think mine is unique enough to coexist with the Steam product. I think it's got some features that the Steam one doesn't.
Third off, we all know that Valve products don't exist until they actually exist.
We were told 2026, but... What does that mean? Exactly, who knows.
And the last thing is that my controller could do something that the Steam Controller can't do,
and that is... Splits in half.
And still works? Still works. Two independent halves communicating to the same dongle.
That's pretty cool. And the best part is the open source of the design so anyone can build one of these.
I cannot wait to check this out. Oh, you'll be doing more than checking it out.
You're gonna build one yourself today. But first, I'll be building a segue to our sponsor.
This thing is so cool, you guys.
On the surface, it's the built-in controller from the Steam Deck,
but hacked together to function standalone, which might sound pretty simple,
but in practice, it involved using a mix of official Valve parts purchased from iFixit,
third-party Steam Deck parts, as well as fully custom trackpads and some custom PCBs
to tie the whole thing together, or apart, as it were.
The custom PCBs also helped make it a bit more affordable.
And all of that, that was just the hardware. The software was a completely separate can of worms, which we'll get to later.
First, for any of the very passionate owners of the original Steam Controller,
I probably won't need to explain this. But for everybody else, what is the appeal?
Because it gives me an extra option for my inputs. So now I can draw my tricks if I want to shove it.
Right, so basically you've got gesture inputs almost.
Gesture inputs pretty much exactly. Games that don't have maybe native gamepad support?
Right. You can use it as a mouse, like an actual mouse, and it's pretty accurate to use your thumb.
And finally, interface navigation. Steam Pig Picture Mode, it's pretty okay.
But if you ever have to leave it and go to Windows, it can be imperfect.
It's something we've talked about extensively on our channel before, but it bears repeating.
It is so cool the way that home 3D printing allows makers to rapidly prototype
and experiment with different designs. What are the pieces that I'm holding right now?
Well, I wanted to be able to mess with the ergonomics of the controller. This parallel controller works great if you have a screen in between,
but with it being so close together, it's not the most ergonomic fit.
Right. So I've brought a couple things to mess with here. So I can just pull that off, slides in here, slides in there.
Both fits like that. So you can see there's a slight angle here and then there's an angle here.
So this actually is probably more similar to how the new Steam Controller will be.
And then this one is special because I added a battery inside of here.
So if I put this here, there's also a slight angle it adds.
Put it in here. You see this light turns on. There's a green light in there.
So that means both halves are actually charging off of it. And then it adds a little bit of ergonomics to it.
What do you think is the coolest part of your controller, though?
Well, I'm kind of a nerd. I'm an electrical engineer. So I really like the fact that they are two separate controllers.
I think programming them to both send data to the dongle was one of the coolest things that I did.
As well as actually the trackpad. Designing that from scratch, that was really what made it come together.
I think that's why no one's really done this project before, is you can't buy a Steam Deck trackpad secondhand.
Now, I saw some criticism on your last video that a six by six grid
probably isn't enough to be accurate. But can you walk people through why that's not really how it works?
It's a six by six grid of electrodes. And each electrode has like a full analog read.
And so that means a range of about a thousand by a thousand.
So it's a lot more granular than six by six. So don't worry about it, basically.
Yeah, don't worry about it at all. You'll find these are plenty accurate.
I can be very specific with my finger placement.
What are you thinking? Nothing, nothing, nothing at all. I'm thinking, do I get to build one now?
Sure. All right, let's do it. So the first thing we need to do then is build a trackpad.
Yes, we do. I've never done that before. All right, it's not too hard.
The trackpad's already designed. Really? You may not sound really hard before.
Designing the trackpad was really hard. Putting it together isn't.
To be safe, use some of this capton tape.
And we'll go over the parts that are already pre-soldered just so you don't accidentally desolder them.
He keeps asking me just in case the answer will change.
No, I don't solder much. Well, you've done like way more intricate soldering than I've ever done.
Yeah, but here's the thing. My job is to learn a lot about something
and get good enough at it to do the video that I'm doing.
And then by literally that afternoon, I will be working on something else
that I need to know completely different things for. You run out of space?
Yep, both the RAM and the long-term storage
are getting pretty tapped out these days. Okay.
I don't know if that's a good way to test the hot air gun. Prove it.
All right, so we're just going to melt it. Pre-tint those pads.
Yeah. If they don't burn anything. So I will say this is definitely the hardest part
of building the controller is this part. The reason that, you know, didn't come installed
is the service I ordered my PCBs made through. They didn't offer that chip as part of their PCB assemblies.
Okay, well, I'm not going to lie. I think they're tinned, but I'm not sure.
Only one way to find out, I guess. So I think first thing that we can solder here
will be the MCUs. They're called the Xiao NRF 52-840C+.
Oh, cool. So in your video, you said you were limited to micro USB,
but I see a USB-C connector. Yeah. So in my original video, I used an Adafruit NRF 52-840 board,
but I've since switched to the Seed Studio one. And this one also has battery connectors.
We can make use of its internal battery charging circuit. It didn't have to add that.
And then we still have a bunch of GPIO. Sick. Okay.
And so we're going to want to keep it as centered as possible. And the way that I like to solder it,
is to only do one pad first, and then we're going to melt that one on,
make sure everything is centered, and then we can solder all the pads. Oh, did I mention I'm calling the project open-split deck?
Oh, cool. The name can still be changed if people have good ideas and want to let me know.
But that's what I'm going with right now. That is the name on the GitHub. This uses what they call casillated holes.
So the solder actually goes, or like the pads actually go all the way to the edge.
And that's what I'm kind of making use of here to be able to solder it down to the PCB
without the need of like through hole. Important to mention with like the actual steam one coming out.
Yeah. Is like if you just want to buy a controller to use, like buy that one.
My project's great and stuff, but like you're going to be someone who enjoys soldering.
Definitely engineering background, not sales and marketing background right here.
So for me or I can solder on these, but I'm going to have you solder on that one. Sure.
On the side, I can flash firmware to it,
so we can pick up your trackpad and see if it works. So flashing firmware on this is pretty straightforward.
What you do is there's a little small reset button on here, double click it,
and then it'll pop up as a flash drive. And it looking for a .uf2 file.
So I brought it with me, but it's also on the GitHub. You can just go and download it under the release section.
And this is my left controller, and I can just copy and paste it over.
And as soon as I do, this will reboot, and you'll see a little red LED turn on,
and there it is. So now this is the left controller.
I'm done. Okay. Check my homework. Check your homework. Make sure you didn't bridge anything.
Looks all connected. Looks good to me. Okay. The one I'm less confident about though,
the trackpad. Yeah, let's check if that works. So we're going to hook it up with the ribbon cables.
Okay. So this one actually installs upside down. You'll see more white later.
Oh, that's wacky. This is the part where we find out what color the magic smoke inside it is.
The trackpad does take a few seconds to boot up. Uh-huh. It's been a few seconds.
So. Oh, okay. Damn. Not seeing it.
Damn. You know what? I'm going to take one more attempt at it,
and then we'll call it. Okay.
That was a pretty simple fix. I just went over the edges with the soldering iron.
Just didn't have enough solder on some of those pads, I think.
Even the hard stuff, I got to say, is not that hard.
My soldering on this, on the first side, is really, really bad.
And then on the second side is only a little bit bad. Like, you'd be able to teach yourself
how to do this level of complexity, I think, over the course of just this project.
All right. So we do have a little bit more soldering to do on this. And then we have a really small button for our home.
It's just the only button that fits. This guy.
Don't worry, the hard part's over. Also this guy.
I've got a really small button. It's not that bad, man.
It's not bad. You're the one who said it's really small. It is really small.
It is that big. Yeah, you can solder that, right? There's just two tabs on this side.
Just two little tabs. So it's a little bit off, but actually it does make it easier to solder
because it's on the side. Okay, so it's a feature, not a bug.
Exactly. And same thing, we'll do our best
to keep it as centered as possible when we do solder it on.
Next, we're moving on to assembling the track pads. Cool. We have these little, I printed them out.
They're basically the springs. Have you ever taken apart a steam deck before?
Yes, it's been a long time. So I had to kind of recreate my own.
So this is actually important that it's printed out of PETG
because PETG is a little more flexible than PLA. Got it.
When you buy the case, it comes with all the stuff you need.
It's a, it's a mod case for a steam deck, which I've pre-cut for you.
Oh, so nice. You're welcome. Thank you.
Oh, damn. There's a thumb print inside this controller forever now.
I was thinking at the end, I might leave this controller with you guys, so it'll be forever imprinted with you.
So same thing, wind up the notch, stick it down. Try not to push on the chips or the connector.
Of course, you don't want to break anything. This would be the worst place to possibly break it.
And what we're going to do too is throw on the ribbon cable,
or FPC, if you want to be technically correct, because we're not going to be able to access this once we hot glue it to here.
Got it. Trackpad spring, we're going to stick it on. You'll see one spot has a little kind of dip in it,
and that's where the ribbon cable is going to come out. Oh, I see it.
That's crazy. We're just going to hot glue this together. Just going to hot glue it together.
That's crazy. There's a few reasons for it. First reason is that hot glue is easily accessible.
And if we need to take it apart again, we can just peel off the hot glue and take it apart.
If you need to get back into it. Sure can. Second reason is that there's not a lot of force that's actually going to be pulling.
There's almost no force that'll pull the trackpad off of it. Right. We don't need a lot to hold it on here.
Right. We could probably get away with double-sided tape if we wanted to. I think it's funny.
It's kind of a meme that you're like so short on this. But for reference, I'm 5'6".
That's the thing you say that.
It was all a setup. This is a huge place where we could save a lot of money as far as the parts go.
The triggers themselves are like 20 USD, which is a lot, right?
Because two of them now it's $40 already. Right. But the inside part that houses the magnet is the part that is pretty complex and would be hard to 3D print,
which is where I may be asking for help. First, we're going to focus on the bumpers.
So you have your right bumper, I have the left bumper, mine has the D-pad. There is a little modification we have to make here.
Oh, of course. It's extra wide on the ends. And that's actually to make it lock into place a little better for the steam deck.
Right. But I have no idea what connector they used on the actual steam deck.
There's like no part number for it. And we're too wide for them. We're too wide, so we've got to cut off a little bit extra.
Oh, okay. And this is very easy. Like if you're doing this, don't be scared.
You can see I just need to aim to cut off that little bit extra.
And there you go. Nice. It's going to be the same thing on the other side.
I know. Quality homemade game controllers. We're going to go ahead and install everything into the case here,
starting with actually the trackpad. Oh, brilliant.
So the trackpad. I'm going to guess it goes like that. It does exactly do that.
Nice. Yep, it's not small for your... Sure do.
That's crazy. And you can get the Prismagic collection at LTTstore.com.
Next, buttons, because we're going to put in the bumpers.
There's a little bit of like a clip that holds in the side.
So you need to have no better word to describe it other than finagle it.
So I'll get in place. So now each side gets three screws.
There is some overlap with a couple of the things. So there's a couple of screws we don't install.
And I just know this because I've memorized it. Tommy B is planning to have a text version of his build guide rather than a video version.
That'll be coming... Hopefully soon. He has a day job, so whenever he gets to it.
One thing I like to do personally, just to make my life easier, is connect the button PCB right now.
You don't seem like the kind of person who likes to make your life easier. Why not?
Because you built your own controller. I'm willing to do things that are difficult if they're worth it.
You know what I mean? Right, right, right, right, right, right. The next one goes at the bottom of my little open split deck logo on the corner.
And that's the long one? Yeah, and that's the right hole. There you go, you caught that one.
Yeah, this is great. It's really coming together. Awkward question.
How much am I going to end up paying for one of these that I built myself?
Right now you're probably sitting around 250 to 300.
Right. But that would also... You'd wind up with probably enough parts to make more than one.
I see, right. One thing that's cool about this too is,
yeah, we're paying a lot more than we would for a regular controller, but we're getting a high quality controller.
Like we've got the aftermarket Gilly kit sticks now.
Let's do a little more soldering. Solder on the battery connector.
I pre-wired them a little bit for you. And they're going to be pretty long.
So we're going to solder to, we have a plus and minus. Just to make sure you line up your black to minus, your red to plus.
We're actually going to wind up cutting them because we're going to also solder in a switch.
We're going to also go ahead and add some safety hot glue. Is that different from regular hot glue?
Yeah, yeah, this one keeps the battery safe. We're just going to go over it with some hot glue.
This helps insulate it and also keep us from potentially accidentally ripping them off.
It does lead into one of the quirks of this device and that it needs to be on to charge.
Originally, I wasn't going to have a power switch at all. I just have it go into like a sleep mode like most electronic devices do.
There's not a physical flipping switch. But one of the issues I ran into is it's actually the hall effect sticks.
They draw power when it's in sleep mode. And I ran out of GPIO pins to use for something that could control the power.
Got it. That's for future Tommy to deal with. Yeah, future Tommy to deal with.
Yeah, screw that guy. And we'll have a lot more pins to work with, which will let us enable things like, you know, turning on and off power.
This is probably a little in the weeds right now. I'm thinking there might be some extras over at LMG.GG slash Floatplane
that didn't make it to the YouTube cut. So we'll see you guys over there.
All right, next, I prefer to cut the red wire. That's going to be your positive.
Yeah, bomb defusal tips. Always cut the red wire.
Always cut the red wire. That's what they say. Not to keep making my projects sound awesome,
but this might be the most jank part. It's just lining up.
The screen is really difficult. It doesn't line up well, just, you know, by default.
And so I'm going to solder one of the holes. Solder a hole.
Yeah, just one of them. The holes? Yeah, the through hole where the, sorry, like these.
Oh, you're spinning that way. And you're going to have to angle it to kind of get it in there.
Oh, yeah. And then it rotates down. Oh, yeah. Make sure the pins are coming through.
This is the part where I mean it's a little jank. Dude, we're close.
Very close. I can smell it. Wait, no, that's the leaded solder.
Take a deep breath. These are cool. They're not your typical vibration motors.
These are actually called LRA, which is a linear resonating actuator.
It's got a baby solenoid in there that pushes forward and back.
Right. Rather than an offset weight on a motor. Currently, my best place I have to install it
is just in between this back button and the ribbon connector for the track button.
OK, so here's where our bougie vibration motor goes.
It is a bougie vibration motor. They're more expensive than a typical vibration motor.
We're going to install our batteries real quick. Cool. Grab a battery, put it into the connector.
Yeah, puncture the battery first, right? Don't puncture the battery. Well, how do you get the energy out of it then?
Battery safety is a really important thing when it comes to lithium ions.
I'm sure this is not the first time people have heard this. But for these batteries that I source specifically,
they're like the ones you're paying more for them than like the ones you can just buy on Amazon or something.
But at least you can guarantee that they're like safe cells. It's really easy to buy knockoff cells
that will just catch on fire. Got it connected.
So I'm going to flip my switch. You should feel it vibrate in a moment.
Before that, triggers. Oh yeah, we'll need those.
Triggers are helpful. Yeah. The little spring goes on there.
See that little knob? And then you got to clip the two things over.
Sure do. One last sanity check before we screw it down. Yeah.
We'll walk over here. Yeah, let's do that. Can you track pad click?
Track pad click. Cool. Hell yeah.
All right. Let's screw together. Oh. So this one's yours.
This one's mine. This is also the part where we install some magnets
to help hold it together. Oh yeah. How do they work? How do they work?
Yeah. I don't know how to explain how magnets work. Are you saying that you're not smart enough to explain it
or I'm not smart enough to understand it? Both. And it should hold in actually pretty solid
even without the screws. That kind of snaps on there a little.
It kind of looks like there's one more hole here. So that hole actually to be able to access that reset button
on the MCU. Got it. Remember we double-clicked that reset button earlier
to put it into the boot loader mode so you could flash firmware to it.
There you go. It'll, I like the word self-clearance,
they'll get better at snapping together as time goes on. Yeah. Sick.
I get to use it now? Yeah, let's use it. Time to play some games?
Heck yeah. I've never played skate. What are the odds you think that your controller
would make me good at it? Very low. Really? We can try.
Is that because your controller is not very good? No, it's because you're probably not very good at skate.
Right. Well, your coaching should make me better at it.
Yes, most definitely. Okay, cool. Oh man, I can do like a flying side kick.
Yeah, jump in the air and hold the right trigger.
Why would you have me do that? So you could do a front flip. So now let go of the right trigger at the right time
and you can land it. Yeah, there you go.
Okay, all right. Okay, I got this. So the way you ollie is by pressing or going down on your right stick
and going up quickly. So if you just put your finger towards the bottom of the track pad
and hold it there, you'll go into an ollie position
and now slide your finger up straight up. Yeah, kick flip.
Okay, let's go. Backside crew. So basically we've just got a lot of granularity in our controls here.
Yes, a lot of customization and just a different way to interact
with the game that you wouldn't have in any other experience. Just like with the steam controller and the steam deck,
if you're not that into the track pads or the game doesn't benefit from it,
you can just completely ignore them. Yeah, there's no reason you have to use them,
but it's that extra layer of interaction you get that I think makes my controller stand out.
We mentioned this very briefly earlier, but officially there's no support for two players just yet,
but you loaded a player tube firmware onto this one?
I hard-coded in a second player support,
so it's still very experimental, so no promises as will work perfectly,
but we can definitely give it a try here. I did do a pre-release on the GitHub for the two bits of firmware.
Ideally in the future, I'll have some sort of like pairing routine where each thing will have its own unique dongle.
Right, yeah. But for right now, any dongle can talk to any controller.
Okay, how do I pass? I think it's B. Nice.
Wait, I have a player down. I have a player down, time out.
Uh, sure. Hey, look at that, you have another player down. Hey, look at another one.
Hey, look at third one. You just pushed me over.
I have nobody up. How am I supposed to fight against that? All three of my players are on the ground.
Hey, you have all the same players I do. You could throw the stick. Look at this replay.
They're just all dead. That's a cheesy goal.
You know what's not cheesy? Is this project? Yeah, it's a little expensive.
Yeah, it's a little time consuming, but as far as like DIY things go,
it's pretty polished actually. Thank you. Good job.
Thank you. Still a lot of things that can prove there's a whole laundry list, but I guess one thing you could take away from this video
and this project is that this is actually probably the least functional. You'll see it.
I have a Discord setup for this project specifically. Okay.
And then there also is a GitHub setup where you can open issues for suggestions.
Let's get all of that linked down below. Thank you so much for coming up here. This was an absolute blast.
This is such a cool project. And who knows, maybe by the next time we talk about it,
you'll be doing some pretty crazy stuff
with like controllers or- I make lots of things. You should subscribe to me.
Yeah, do that. Thank you for bringing me out. This was a great time.
And this is a great time to tell you about our sponsor.
If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the time that we had that kid up
who built his own laptop. That was pretty wild too. It was a cool video.
Yeah, would you watch that? I did watch that one. So, so smart. That was so smart.
Yeah. It's like not fair to the other people. Right?