Guitar Hero Controllers

Guitar Hero has been one of my favorite video games for a long time now. As I played more, I began collecting the controllers. Some of the controllers that I got were broken. This got me wondering whether or not I could fix them, and in turn, whether or not I could modify them. The first mod I wanted to try was replacing the stock membrane buttons with mechanical keyswitches. For this, I designed a number of parts to fit the switches into the guitar. 3D printing is a big part of this project. I learned a lot of designing for 3D printing by making custom parts and trying to copy existing parts. I designed custom buttons, as well as a custom faceplate. There are also numerous other small parts that I designed to make everything work well together. Modding guitars also got me into microcontrollers. I was always intimidated to learn about using Arduinos, until I decided to try to use one to allow a PlayStation guitar to work with a PC. I learned a lot about microcontrollers doing this project, and it was pretty much the first time I had ever incorporated electronics into a project. Since then, I’ve modded many guitars, which I unfortunately did not document very well. For me this is an ongoing project since I find it to be a good project that has a lot of potential variety.