When it comes to the maker community, there’s no greater satisfaction than creating a custom project for yourself with your own hands. For maker and developer RealHowl, as they’re known over at Reddit, that satisfaction came in their latest fight stick build, which they describe as a dream creation. This fight stick features a handcrafted wooden case and an all-button design powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller.
The Raspberry Pi seems to be a go-to board for fight stick enthusiasts, as we recently covered this modded Mad Catz TE1 that uses two Pis in its redesign. This project, however, is different in that it’s made entirely from scratch. Its outer case is made from wood, and the interior components were wired and programmed by RealHowl.
We reached out to RealHowl for more details about this fight stick design and got a better idea of what went into its creation. RealHowl explained that several types of wood were used in the case design. The top and bottom are pieces of guayubira, while the sides are made of cancharana, both South American woods. The border and inlays are made from purple heart, which add a gorgeous purple accent.
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The main board used to power the fight stick is a Raspberry Pi Pico. It accepts input from several arcade buttons daisy chained to the Pico’s GPIO pins. The buttons are Sanwa OBSC clear arcade buttons. This particular fightstick is designed without a joystick, so it exclusively features buttons. It also has a Neutrik NAUSB-W-B USB gender changer.
Software-wise, RealHowl confirmed the fight stick is using GP2040-CE firmware. This is open-source gamepad firmware designed specifically for the Raspberry Pi Pico and other RP2040-based boards. You can read more about it over at the official GP2040-CE website. You can read more about the firmware there and download it for experimentation.
To get a closer look at this Raspberry Pi project, you can check out the original thread shared on Reddit. Be sure to follow RealHowl for more cool fight stick projects and any future updates to this one.
