Wireless controllers for all your retro systems

February 13th, 2012, 23:56 Posted By: wraggster


Remember those old wireless controllers made for the consoles of our youth like the NES and Super Nintendo? They didn’t work well, mostly owing to the fact they were built using the same infrared technology that is found in a remote control. Now that all the modern consoles are wireless, [micro] over at the nftgames forum decided toupdate his classic systems for wireless control.
The transmitters and receivers are built around an nRF24L01+ radio module that operates in the 2.4 GHz band. [micro] has the process of converting his controllers down to a science. He cuts the cord and wires the controller up to an AVR running at 16 MHz. The AVR sends this to the receiver where the button presses are sent through the original controller port. Basically, [micro] recreated a WaveBird controller for his NES, SNES, Saturn and N64.
The controllers are powered by internal lithium batteries, but the charging ICs are too expensive to put in each controller. To solve this problem, [micro] crafted a smallexternal charging circuit that plugs into a 3.5mm jack on each controller. Check out [micro]‘s controller demo after the break.

http://hackaday.com/2012/02/13/wirel...retro-systems/

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