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Some of you may remember when we talked about this absolutely wild controller from the same mad lad

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who built a DIY steam deck out of a framework laptop.

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Well, at that time, no one knew that an official Steam Controller 2 was on the horizon.

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So one man, Tommy B, did what Valve wouldn't and DIYed his own Steam Controller 2.

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And guess what? He's here with us today!

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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?

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I wouldn't say it's awkward. First off, I think this was a great learning experience for me.

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I learned so much about how controllers work and different wireless protocols and like building a trackpad from scratch.

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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.

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Third off, we all know that Valve products don't exist until they actually exist.

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We were told 2026, but... What does that mean? Exactly, who knows.

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And the last thing is that my controller could do something that the Steam Controller can't do,

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and that is... Splits in half.

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And still works? Still works. Two independent halves communicating to the same dongle.

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That's pretty cool. And the best part is the open source of the design so anyone can build one of these.

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I cannot wait to check this out. Oh, you'll be doing more than checking it out.

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You're gonna build one yourself today. But first, I'll be building a segue to our sponsor.

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This thing is so cool, you guys.

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On the surface, it's the built-in controller from the Steam Deck,

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but hacked together to function standalone, which might sound pretty simple,

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but in practice, it involved using a mix of official Valve parts purchased from iFixit,

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third-party Steam Deck parts, as well as fully custom trackpads and some custom PCBs

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to tie the whole thing together, or apart, as it were.

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The custom PCBs also helped make it a bit more affordable.

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And all of that, that was just the hardware. The software was a completely separate can of worms, which we'll get to later.

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First, for any of the very passionate owners of the original Steam Controller,

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I probably won't need to explain this. But for everybody else, what is the appeal?

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Because it gives me an extra option for my inputs. So now I can draw my tricks if I want to shove it.

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Right, so basically you've got gesture inputs almost.

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Gesture inputs pretty much exactly. Games that don't have maybe native gamepad support?

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Right. You can use it as a mouse, like an actual mouse, and it's pretty accurate to use your thumb.

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And finally, interface navigation. Steam Pig Picture Mode, it's pretty okay.

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But if you ever have to leave it and go to Windows, it can be imperfect.

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It's something we've talked about extensively on our channel before, but it bears repeating.

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It is so cool the way that home 3D printing allows makers to rapidly prototype

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and experiment with different designs. What are the pieces that I'm holding right now?

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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,

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but with it being so close together, it's not the most ergonomic fit.

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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.

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Both fits like that. So you can see there's a slight angle here and then there's an angle here.

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So this actually is probably more similar to how the new Steam Controller will be.

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And then this one is special because I added a battery inside of here.

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So if I put this here, there's also a slight angle it adds.

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Put it in here. You see this light turns on. There's a green light in there.

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So that means both halves are actually charging off of it. And then it adds a little bit of ergonomics to it.

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What do you think is the coolest part of your controller, though?

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Well, I'm kind of a nerd. I'm an electrical engineer. So I really like the fact that they are two separate controllers.

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I think programming them to both send data to the dongle was one of the coolest things that I did.

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As well as actually the trackpad. Designing that from scratch, that was really what made it come together.

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I think that's why no one's really done this project before, is you can't buy a Steam Deck trackpad secondhand.

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Now, I saw some criticism on your last video that a six by six grid

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probably isn't enough to be accurate. But can you walk people through why that's not really how it works?

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It's a six by six grid of electrodes. And each electrode has like a full analog read.

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And so that means a range of about a thousand by a thousand.

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So it's a lot more granular than six by six. So don't worry about it, basically.

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Yeah, don't worry about it at all. You'll find these are plenty accurate.

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I can be very specific with my finger placement.

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What are you thinking? Nothing, nothing, nothing at all. I'm thinking, do I get to build one now?

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Sure. All right, let's do it. So the first thing we need to do then is build a trackpad.

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Yes, we do. I've never done that before. All right, it's not too hard.

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The trackpad's already designed. Really? You may not sound really hard before.

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Designing the trackpad was really hard. Putting it together isn't.

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To be safe, use some of this capton tape.

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And we'll go over the parts that are already pre-soldered just so you don't accidentally desolder them.

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He keeps asking me just in case the answer will change.

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No, I don't solder much. Well, you've done like way more intricate soldering than I've ever done.

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Yeah, but here's the thing. My job is to learn a lot about something

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and get good enough at it to do the video that I'm doing.

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And then by literally that afternoon, I will be working on something else

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that I need to know completely different things for. You run out of space?

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Yep, both the RAM and the long-term storage

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are getting pretty tapped out these days. Okay.

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I don't know if that's a good way to test the hot air gun. Prove it.

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All right, so we're just going to melt it. Pre-tint those pads.

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Yeah. If they don't burn anything. So I will say this is definitely the hardest part

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of building the controller is this part. The reason that, you know, didn't come installed

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is the service I ordered my PCBs made through. They didn't offer that chip as part of their PCB assemblies.

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Okay, well, I'm not going to lie. I think they're tinned, but I'm not sure.

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Only one way to find out, I guess. So I think first thing that we can solder here

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will be the MCUs. They're called the Xiao NRF 52-840C+.

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Oh, cool. So in your video, you said you were limited to micro USB,

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but I see a USB-C connector. Yeah. So in my original video, I used an Adafruit NRF 52-840 board,

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but I've since switched to the Seed Studio one. And this one also has battery connectors.

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We can make use of its internal battery charging circuit. It didn't have to add that.

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And then we still have a bunch of GPIO. Sick. Okay.

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And so we're going to want to keep it as centered as possible. And the way that I like to solder it,

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is to only do one pad first, and then we're going to melt that one on,

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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?

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Oh, cool. The name can still be changed if people have good ideas and want to let me know.

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But that's what I'm going with right now. That is the name on the GitHub. This uses what they call casillated holes.

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So the solder actually goes, or like the pads actually go all the way to the edge.

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And that's what I'm kind of making use of here to be able to solder it down to the PCB

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without the need of like through hole. Important to mention with like the actual steam one coming out.

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Yeah. Is like if you just want to buy a controller to use, like buy that one.

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My project's great and stuff, but like you're going to be someone who enjoys soldering.

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Definitely engineering background, not sales and marketing background right here.

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So for me or I can solder on these, but I'm going to have you solder on that one. Sure.

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On the side, I can flash firmware to it,

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so we can pick up your trackpad and see if it works. So flashing firmware on this is pretty straightforward.

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What you do is there's a little small reset button on here, double click it,

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and then it'll pop up as a flash drive. And it looking for a .uf2 file.

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So I brought it with me, but it's also on the GitHub. You can just go and download it under the release section.

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And this is my left controller, and I can just copy and paste it over.

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And as soon as I do, this will reboot, and you'll see a little red LED turn on,

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and there it is. So now this is the left controller.

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I'm done. Okay. Check my homework. Check your homework. Make sure you didn't bridge anything.

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Looks all connected. Looks good to me. Okay. The one I'm less confident about though,

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the trackpad. Yeah, let's check if that works. So we're going to hook it up with the ribbon cables.

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Okay. So this one actually installs upside down. You'll see more white later.

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Oh, that's wacky. This is the part where we find out what color the magic smoke inside it is.

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The trackpad does take a few seconds to boot up. Uh-huh. It's been a few seconds.

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So. Oh, okay. Damn. Not seeing it.

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Damn. You know what? I'm going to take one more attempt at it,

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and then we'll call it. Okay.

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That was a pretty simple fix. I just went over the edges with the soldering iron.

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Just didn't have enough solder on some of those pads, I think.

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Even the hard stuff, I got to say, is not that hard.

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My soldering on this, on the first side, is really, really bad.

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And then on the second side is only a little bit bad. Like, you'd be able to teach yourself

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how to do this level of complexity, I think, over the course of just this project.

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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.

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It's just the only button that fits. This guy.

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Don't worry, the hard part's over. Also this guy.

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I've got a really small button. It's not that bad, man.

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It's not bad. You're the one who said it's really small. It is really small.

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It is that big. Yeah, you can solder that, right? There's just two tabs on this side.

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Just two little tabs. So it's a little bit off, but actually it does make it easier to solder

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because it's on the side. Okay, so it's a feature, not a bug.

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Exactly. And same thing, we'll do our best

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to keep it as centered as possible when we do solder it on.

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Next, we're moving on to assembling the track pads. Cool. We have these little, I printed them out.

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They're basically the springs. Have you ever taken apart a steam deck before?

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Yes, it's been a long time. So I had to kind of recreate my own.

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So this is actually important that it's printed out of PETG

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because PETG is a little more flexible than PLA. Got it.

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When you buy the case, it comes with all the stuff you need.

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It's a, it's a mod case for a steam deck, which I've pre-cut for you.

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Oh, so nice. You're welcome. Thank you.

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Oh, damn. There's a thumb print inside this controller forever now.

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I was thinking at the end, I might leave this controller with you guys, so it'll be forever imprinted with you.

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So same thing, wind up the notch, stick it down. Try not to push on the chips or the connector.

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Of course, you don't want to break anything. This would be the worst place to possibly break it.

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And what we're going to do too is throw on the ribbon cable,

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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.

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Got it. Trackpad spring, we're going to stick it on. You'll see one spot has a little kind of dip in it,

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and that's where the ribbon cable is going to come out. Oh, I see it.

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That's crazy. We're just going to hot glue this together. Just going to hot glue it together.

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That's crazy. There's a few reasons for it. First reason is that hot glue is easily accessible.

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And if we need to take it apart again, we can just peel off the hot glue and take it apart.

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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.

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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.

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Right. We could probably get away with double-sided tape if we wanted to. I think it's funny.

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It's kind of a meme that you're like so short on this. But for reference, I'm 5'6".

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That's the thing you say that.

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It was all a setup. This is a huge place where we could save a lot of money as far as the parts go.

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The triggers themselves are like 20 USD, which is a lot, right?

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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,

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which is where I may be asking for help. First, we're going to focus on the bumpers.

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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.

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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.

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Right. But I have no idea what connector they used on the actual steam deck.

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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.

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Oh, okay. And this is very easy. Like if you're doing this, don't be scared.

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You can see I just need to aim to cut off that little bit extra.

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And there you go. Nice. It's going to be the same thing on the other side.

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I know. Quality homemade game controllers. We're going to go ahead and install everything into the case here,

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starting with actually the trackpad. Oh, brilliant.

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So the trackpad. I'm going to guess it goes like that. It does exactly do that.

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Nice. Yep, it's not small for your... Sure do.

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That's crazy. And you can get the Prismagic collection at LTTstore.com.

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Next, buttons, because we're going to put in the bumpers.

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There's a little bit of like a clip that holds in the side.

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So you need to have no better word to describe it other than finagle it.

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So I'll get in place. So now each side gets three screws.

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There is some overlap with a couple of the things. So there's a couple of screws we don't install.

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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.

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That'll be coming... Hopefully soon. He has a day job, so whenever he gets to it.

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One thing I like to do personally, just to make my life easier, is connect the button PCB right now.

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You don't seem like the kind of person who likes to make your life easier. Why not?

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Because you built your own controller. I'm willing to do things that are difficult if they're worth it.

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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.

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And that's the long one? Yeah, and that's the right hole. There you go, you caught that one.

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Yeah, this is great. It's really coming together. Awkward question.

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How much am I going to end up paying for one of these that I built myself?

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Right now you're probably sitting around 250 to 300.

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Right. But that would also... You'd wind up with probably enough parts to make more than one.

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I see, right. One thing that's cool about this too is,

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yeah, we're paying a lot more than we would for a regular controller, but we're getting a high quality controller.

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Like we've got the aftermarket Gilly kit sticks now.

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Let's do a little more soldering. Solder on the battery connector.

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I pre-wired them a little bit for you. And they're going to be pretty long.

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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.

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We're actually going to wind up cutting them because we're going to also solder in a switch.

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We're going to also go ahead and add some safety hot glue. Is that different from regular hot glue?

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Yeah, yeah, this one keeps the battery safe. We're just going to go over it with some hot glue.

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This helps insulate it and also keep us from potentially accidentally ripping them off.

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It does lead into one of the quirks of this device and that it needs to be on to charge.

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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.

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There's not a physical flipping switch. But one of the issues I ran into is it's actually the hall effect sticks.

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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.

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Got it. That's for future Tommy to deal with. Yeah, future Tommy to deal with.

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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.

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This is probably a little in the weeds right now. I'm thinking there might be some extras over at LMG.GG slash Floatplane

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that didn't make it to the YouTube cut. So we'll see you guys over there.

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All right, next, I prefer to cut the red wire. That's going to be your positive.

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Yeah, bomb defusal tips. Always cut the red wire.

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Always cut the red wire. That's what they say. Not to keep making my projects sound awesome,

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but this might be the most jank part. It's just lining up.

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The screen is really difficult. It doesn't line up well, just, you know, by default.

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And so I'm going to solder one of the holes. Solder a hole.

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Yeah, just one of them. The holes? Yeah, the through hole where the, sorry, like these.

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Oh, you're spinning that way. And you're going to have to angle it to kind of get it in there.

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Oh, yeah. And then it rotates down. Oh, yeah. Make sure the pins are coming through.

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This is the part where I mean it's a little jank. Dude, we're close.

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Very close. I can smell it. Wait, no, that's the leaded solder.

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Take a deep breath. These are cool. They're not your typical vibration motors.

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These are actually called LRA, which is a linear resonating actuator.

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It's got a baby solenoid in there that pushes forward and back.

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Right. Rather than an offset weight on a motor. Currently, my best place I have to install it

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is just in between this back button and the ribbon connector for the track button.

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OK, so here's where our bougie vibration motor goes.

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It is a bougie vibration motor. They're more expensive than a typical vibration motor.

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We're going to install our batteries real quick. Cool. Grab a battery, put it into the connector.

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Yeah, puncture the battery first, right? Don't puncture the battery. Well, how do you get the energy out of it then?

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Battery safety is a really important thing when it comes to lithium ions.

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I'm sure this is not the first time people have heard this. But for these batteries that I source specifically,

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they're like the ones you're paying more for them than like the ones you can just buy on Amazon or something.

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But at least you can guarantee that they're like safe cells. It's really easy to buy knockoff cells

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that will just catch on fire. Got it connected.

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So I'm going to flip my switch. You should feel it vibrate in a moment.

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Before that, triggers. Oh yeah, we'll need those.

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Triggers are helpful. Yeah. The little spring goes on there.

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See that little knob? And then you got to clip the two things over.

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Sure do. One last sanity check before we screw it down. Yeah.

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We'll walk over here. Yeah, let's do that. Can you track pad click?

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Track pad click. Cool. Hell yeah.

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All right. Let's screw together. Oh. So this one's yours.

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This one's mine. This is also the part where we install some magnets

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to help hold it together. Oh yeah. How do they work? How do they work?

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Yeah. I don't know how to explain how magnets work. Are you saying that you're not smart enough to explain it

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or I'm not smart enough to understand it? Both. And it should hold in actually pretty solid

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even without the screws. That kind of snaps on there a little.

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It kind of looks like there's one more hole here. So that hole actually to be able to access that reset button

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on the MCU. Got it. Remember we double-clicked that reset button earlier

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to put it into the boot loader mode so you could flash firmware to it.

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There you go. It'll, I like the word self-clearance,

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they'll get better at snapping together as time goes on. Yeah. Sick.

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I get to use it now? Yeah, let's use it. Time to play some games?

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Heck yeah. I've never played skate. What are the odds you think that your controller

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would make me good at it? Very low. Really? We can try.

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Is that because your controller is not very good? No, it's because you're probably not very good at skate.

252
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Right. Well, your coaching should make me better at it.

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Yes, most definitely. Okay, cool. Oh man, I can do like a flying side kick.

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Yeah, jump in the air and hold the right trigger.

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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

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and you can land it. Yeah, there you go.

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Okay, all right. Okay, I got this. So the way you ollie is by pressing or going down on your right stick

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and going up quickly. So if you just put your finger towards the bottom of the track pad

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and hold it there, you'll go into an ollie position

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and now slide your finger up straight up. Yeah, kick flip.

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Okay, let's go. Backside crew. So basically we've just got a lot of granularity in our controls here.

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Yes, a lot of customization and just a different way to interact

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with the game that you wouldn't have in any other experience. Just like with the steam controller and the steam deck,

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if you're not that into the track pads or the game doesn't benefit from it,

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you can just completely ignore them. Yeah, there's no reason you have to use them,

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but it's that extra layer of interaction you get that I think makes my controller stand out.

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We mentioned this very briefly earlier, but officially there's no support for two players just yet,

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but you loaded a player tube firmware onto this one?

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I hard-coded in a second player support,

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so it's still very experimental, so no promises as will work perfectly,

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but we can definitely give it a try here. I did do a pre-release on the GitHub for the two bits of firmware.

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Ideally in the future, I'll have some sort of like pairing routine where each thing will have its own unique dongle.

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Right, yeah. But for right now, any dongle can talk to any controller.

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Okay, how do I pass? I think it's B. Nice.

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Wait, I have a player down. I have a player down, time out.

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Uh, sure. Hey, look at that, you have another player down. Hey, look at another one.

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Hey, look at third one. You just pushed me over.

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I have nobody up. How am I supposed to fight against that? All three of my players are on the ground.

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Hey, you have all the same players I do. You could throw the stick. Look at this replay.

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They're just all dead. That's a cheesy goal.

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You know what's not cheesy? Is this project? Yeah, it's a little expensive.

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Yeah, it's a little time consuming, but as far as like DIY things go,

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it's pretty polished actually. Thank you. Good job.

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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

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and this project is that this is actually probably the least functional. You'll see it.

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I have a Discord setup for this project specifically. Okay.

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And then there also is a GitHub setup where you can open issues for suggestions.

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Let's get all of that linked down below. Thank you so much for coming up here. This was an absolute blast.

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This is such a cool project. And who knows, maybe by the next time we talk about it,

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you'll be doing some pretty crazy stuff

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with like controllers or- I make lots of things. You should subscribe to me.

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Yeah, do that. Thank you for bringing me out. This was a great time.

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And this is a great time to tell you about our sponsor.

294
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If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the time that we had that kid up

295
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who built his own laptop. That was pretty wild too. It was a cool video.

296
00:21:06,240 --> 00:21:10,160
Yeah, would you watch that? I did watch that one. So, so smart. That was so smart.

297
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Yeah. It's like not fair to the other people. Right?