Functional Print: Adaptive controller for one handed PS4 control

A little while ago I saw a post on twitter from a gentleman named Caleb who runs the Controller Project. Since supporting nhs during covid by printing visors and ear savers my printer has been used for industrial prints (for my day job), printer parts and printing stuff for fun. It seemed like time to give a little back again so I put my name forward and quickly got 2 jobs to print. Both adaptive controllers for right hand use on the PS4. If you are interested in supporting the project get in touch via the website and let Caleb know you can help, they get requests from all over the world!

The model is a really awesome design that fits together using filament as hinge pins along with other parts that clip together to give a surprisingly robust feeling assembly. The model is available on Prusa Printers and the designer Akaki deserves some serious credit for his/her work which also includes similar designs for other controllers. Take a look at the video the designer provides showing it being used!

On my vcore 3, the parts take around 7 hours to print (despite what the slicer suggests hah!) and I opted to use brims as some of the taller parts need them. In hindsight, this adds quite a lot of clean-up work and therefore I’d probably do the print in two separate plates in the future with just two tall parts being printed with a brim.

The parts are pretty easy to print. As mentioned the only exception are the two tall parts which have quite small footprints and I found I struggled a bit with them being knocked over without a brim. Take a look at the time lapse below to see the print!

Having done two orders for a total of 5 controllers (It’s good for people to have spares!) you end up with a few boxes of bits! Note I swapped to mouse ears to reduce my cleanup time!

Next comes the clean-up and assembly. It is particularly important to make sure there are no sharp edges or elephants foot because it will both affect how easy it is for the joints to move but also the comfort for the end user! The assembly process is not documented that well but it is reasonably easy to look at the final picture of the assembled device and work it out from there!

Here is the parts in their ‘ready to ship condition’. I added in a little section of filament in case any of the hinge parts break so they can replace them without having to order a whole filament sample!

The finished article fully assembled and attached onto a PS4 controller. Again I am amazed by what can be achieved with such simple printed push fit connections and some hinges made of filament!

And finally here is me attaching it to the controller and giving the controls a little spin. Every works nicely and because I spent a decent amount of time ensuring the edges of the pins were nicely smoothed everything moves nicely without catching.