In my spare time I enjoy making simple modifications of gaming controllers for people who have special physical needs. Its a hobby that makes me feel good and helps other people. Not a bad trade. If you’ve been following along, you should already have seen part 1 where I added easy to click buttons that activated the “thumbstick click”.
From what I’ve seen, there are two very common issues that people run into. They can’t depress the thumbsticks to make them click, and they can’t use the triggers. In part 1, I have already fixed the thumbstick issue. Now, I’m going to tackle that trigger.
As I stated in part 1, this is for Jay. Jay has explained to me how his hand falls on the controller. We brainstormed for a bit on how to make that trigger reachable for him. Not only did we want to make it easier for him, we wanted to come up with an extremely simple piece that would help people with a wide variety of issues. Together we went through a series of refinements.
Here you can see how the concept evolved. The final version is on the right and can be used from multiple angles. Like any project, this one wasn’t without its fair share of frustration. My 3D printer, which Lulzbot donated to thecontrollerproject.com quite some time ago, has been used a lot and was beginning to have issues. Prints were failing for even the simplest builds. Luckily Lulzbot tech support and the 3D printing community jumped to help and we got everything sorted out.
After successful prints, we had to figure out how we were going to glue this lever into place. The trigger is extremely slick, so we thought that hot glue, or pretty much any glue might and up simply detaching if you applied pressure to the top of the lever. I took a dremmel tool and cut some ridges into that nice shiny surface. Some JB Weld will hold it securely in place now.
The shoulder button presented a slight problem as well. Like the trigger, it is extremely slick. The angle at which Jay has to hold his hand means that his finger will slide off of the shoulder button repeatedly. To help stop this from happening I cut ridges in it with my dremmel and added some globs of silicon. I was hoping the silicon would help his fingers grip (the ridges helped a lot), but I suspect the silicon will fall off after a short period of use. We may try a thin layer of sugru if the ridges aren’t enough. Alternatively I considered removing the plastic shoulder button and giving it a few coats of plasti-dip, a possible route in the future.
Thanks to Jay’s help, we now have an Xbox One trigger extender that can be downloaded from thingiverse or youmagine and printed. Hopefully this helps some people out! If you or anyone you know could benefit from one of these and does not have access to a printer, email me.
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