This joystick was a long time in the making. Building the frame was easy enough but coming up with the right color and finish took longer.

The customer didn’t really like the standard transtint green because it was too bright. He also liked the cordovan color and thought that having the two colors on the case would be nice. I didn’t like the possible problem of the colors bleeding together in the corners. So on the test piece I mixed the two colors as a sample for him. You can see the differences in the two following pictures. He went with the custom blend.

While the finish color was a bit complicated nothing compared to the work involved with the electronics however. This involved time learning a new skill, programing PIC chips to control the LED lighting effects. There are 4 separate lighting effects each controlled by it’s own chip. The first one is one I have done many times, lighting up the buttons when they are pressed. A simple circuit using a logic chip did this job. The other three were a bit more complex and involved the programming. I drilled out the joystick shaft to run the wires for a RGB LED (Red, Green, Blue). This is controlled by a small chip the cycles through the spectrum in about 15 seconds. The next effect uses four green LEDs in the base. One of the LEDs is randomly chosen to flicker. Then after a random interval another LED is chosen. The final effect is embedded into the artwork and is best seen in a video I did for the customer. Here are two short videos showing the LED lighting effects

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