This project contains case files, instructions and bill of materials for assembling a Beatmania IIDX controller that follows the arcade spec as closely as it is reasonable.
You should send the laser cut files (.dxf) for a laser cut service and ask for 3mm acrylic/plexiglass, 6mm acrylic and 6mm MDF. Files are named accordingly to avoid confusion.
There is also the original F3Z file for Fusion 360 in case you want to make any changes, you're free to do whatever you want with it really lol.
You might want to have the top acrylic plate as clear acrylic in case you want to put an artwork underneath it.
Here is everything you need to buy.
As for laser cutting, some popular services are sendcutsend and ponoko but I encourage you to look locally.
- Hardware
- 4x M5x30 screws
- 8x M5x16 screws
- 32x M5x10 screws (more than 10mm, less than 15mm)
- 44x M5 flanged nuts
- 6x M3x10 screws (can be slightly longer)
- 6x M3 nuts
- 6mm flanged shaft coupler
- USB-B Panel Connector (only types B, C and E work — do not buy the ones with a recessed port)
- Adhesive felt (for the turntable)
- Rubber feet (for the bottom of the controller)
- Wood glue
- Turntable
- 1x Chinese rotary encoder
- Wiring
- 22x 0.187" (4.8mm) faston terminals
- 22x 0.250" (6.3mm) faston terminals
- 20 AWG stranded wire (highly recommend buying 2 colors)
- 3D Printed Parts
- 1x Turntable Body
- 1x Encoder Lock
- Optional: 1x Turntable Washer (thicker = less friction)
- PCB
You will need to glue together the MDF pieces with finger joints. Spread glue around the finger joints and join them together. Make sure you use something to apply some pressure around the controller.
After gluing all the wood faces together, let them dry for a day. After that you can start screwing in the acrylic plates around the controller.
The MDF faces have hex-shaped holes — these will fit the M5 flanged nuts. Insert the nut from the inside and screw in the acrylic plate from the outside.
Repeat this for all faces except the bottom one, which will be the last one.
Print the turntable body and encoder lock. Use the 6mm flanged shaft coupler to connect the encoder shaft to the turntable. The encoder lock holds the nuts for the turntable disc to screw to the shaft coupler.
From top to bottom that would look like: Turntable Disc -> Optional Washers -> Shaft Coupler -> Encoder Lock
The 4x m3 screws need to go through all of those parts.
Apply adhesive felt pads to the turntable base so it spins smoothly. Depending on the thickness of the felt you might need to adjust the resistance by introducing the optional washers. More/Thicker washers = less contact with the felt, thus less friction.
The most important concept to learn is that whenever a button pin and a GND pin connect, that triggers a button press. When a button is pressed, it closes the contact between those pins.
Starting first from the ground wire, you will need to make sure every button and encoder is connected to GND. You can do this by daisy chaining the ground wire between everything, or by breaking out from a single point into multiple ground wires.
For the encoder the wiring pinout is:
- Green: A phase
- White: B phase
- Red: VCC / 5V
- Black: GND
If you want to use a PCB to make the wiring more organized and maintenance easier, take a look at the Pi Pico Shield by Infecta. It is a purpose-built shield for rhythm game controllers that breaks out all the pins you need cleanly.
I recommend taking a look at this video from Cons&Stuff to get a general idea of how to assemble the controller. The idea of this project is very similar and can be adapted.
You can opt for a Raspberry Pi Pico which has a more powerful MCU, or an Arduino which is already established and has a bunch of premade code. Here are some recommendations:
- Pi Pico
- Arduino atmega32u4
Take a look at the respective git repos for information on pinout and configuration.
You will probably need to adjust the sensitivity on your encoder depending on how many PPRs it has.
If this has been helpful support me on ko-fi, good luck on building your controller!
