Custom silicone conductive button pads needed! - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / projects

author: WyverntekGameRepairs
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 15, 2019, 09:22:49 pm
content: Hi, as you may know (if you've read any of my other posts) I'm trying to start a business, and part of that business involves designing and producing accessories/parts for video game consoles.I have decided to hold off on the design of the N64 power supply until I can come to a good solution to a few issues I am currently facing. At the current moment, I am getting ready to move onto the next stage of design for a NES controller I am creating. It is as close to the original as possible to maintain the original feel of the controllers. I am aware that there are plenty of other 3rd party manufacturers of these controllers, but the main difference between my design and the other competetors' designs, is staying true to the original. This includes quality, look, feel, design, and sturdiness. The only thing different between my design and Nintendo's original design is that my PCB is two-layered instead of single-layered.One of the biggest parts of the controller are the buttons. These are the most important part, as the user controls the game with them. I've felt many controllers from third-parties before, and they don't feel right when compared to OEM controllers. The buttons are the hardest thing to get right. I've seen tactile pushbuttons be used before, and it only works sometimes. Most of the time, they feel far too clicky and rigid - and unpleasant. Some controllers I've felt have mushy, spongy, soft buttons that take a full second to return to their normal position. It feels gross, slow, and is very hard to use when controlling a fast-paced game. Anyone who has owned an NES or still does: Do you remember the feeling of the original controller's buttons? They were clicky, but in a good way. They were satisfying to push, and they felt natural. This is what I'm after. I am hoping to find a supplier for silicone conductive buttons that will work with me to find the right design that feels almost exactly like the original buttons.The material for the conductive pads will be carbon.If you can help me find the right supplier for this application, I would be very grateful.And yes I have done research myself, but I want to ask the community what they feel is best because I know there are probably people here who have designed things that needed silicone buttons of a good quality.In case you are curious how far I've gotten in the design, I've finished the schematic and PCB layout on EasyEDA and built a working experimental prototype. The next stage is designing and prototyping the buttons, shell, and labels.Thanks!

author: ataradov
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 15, 2019, 10:29:59 pm
content: The fact that you even thinking about getting Nintendo to approve or license anything, shows how far you are from getting anything real. Be glad if they don't sue you. That's the best outcome here.As for the buttons - go to the button manufactures and send them the sample. They have equipment that can measure the force profile and they can copy overall physical design.

author: WyverntekGameRepairs
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 15, 2019, 10:40:34 pm
content: Quote from: ataradov on December 15, 2019, 10:29:59 pmNintendo no longer owns the design. The patent has expired as far as I know, so they can't exactly sue me for replicating their design. Besides, if I have it where Nintendo gets a percentage of my profit (maybe around 5%) from the controllers, they won't mind me using it because I won't exactly be using their design only to my advantage.Also also, if Nintendo would have sued me, why haven't they sued the many other manufacturers that copy their design? Check out Amazon and eBay, you will see many fake NES Classic systems that claim to be from Nintendo but in fact are bootlegs. They have Nintendo logos and everything, and yet Nintendo doesn't sue them or notice them.Just saying.Quote from: ataradov on December 15, 2019, 10:29:59 pmI mean, I could do that. Problem is, I don't know who to go to. There are a lot of companies claiming to be great, and I have no experience in the business of silicone buttons. Hence why I ask if there is any specific manufacturer or supplier I should go to.Though, I will definitely have to do that when I manage to find someone.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 16, 2019, 10:43:57 am
content: Finding the manufacturer is mostly about looking trough alibaba a bit and contacting a few of them for what they can do. Try getting some samples from two different ones and see what works best for you.As for Nintendo licensing i wouldn't even try talking to them. They would most likely have no interest in this as they are turning around insane amount of money on the modern consoles, so whatever royalties they could get from you would be a drop in the ocean even if the royalty was a more reasonable 20 to 50%. If anything contacting them would get you on there sharp "Threat to our IP" radar. Remember these are the crazy corporate nutjobs that use legal pressure to keep people from uploading gameplay videos of there games as they see that a a threat to there IP. They even find writing an emulator for there game console being a threat to there IP.

author: WyverntekGameRepairs
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 16, 2019, 02:49:48 pm
content: Quote from: Berni on December 16, 2019, 10:43:57 amOkay, I'll do that then. Sounds the easiest route to go. Thanks!Quote from: Berni on December 16, 2019, 10:43:57 amShit, you've got a point. Maybe I'd be better off leaving the licensing and approval to Sega Enterprises and Atari. Maybe I'll try with Sony for PS1 controllers, but Sony is a really big company and they might be using the same tactics as Nintendo. Microsoft, of course, is a definite no-go. As much as I'd like to make my own licensed 3rd-party og Xbox controllers, Microsoft would probably slap me in the face with a lawsuit.Sega and Atari are my best bets then, because they can't afford a lawsuit and they also are more open to licensing 3rd parties. (the nightmare that was the AtGames Sega Genesis Mini comes to mind)Though it is really stupid that an 18 year old kid trying to start a small business to repair video game consoles and make some nice accessories for them would be a "threat to their IP." Just goes to show how absolutely greedy and f*cked up economics and businesses have become.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 16, 2019, 04:08:43 pm
content: Even Atari and Sega while they might not be big anymore could certainly send a team of lawyers your way if they wanted to, but at least they appear to act more sensible than that. But don't expect to easily get a licenses deal with any of them unless you already are a decent sized company that can produce and ship in the 10s of thousands of units, this is a big market after all.In general releasing these official retro mini consoles that we are seeing lately is mostly a cash grab targeted at nostalgia. The things are mostly just little ARM based linux computers that boot straight into an emulator. They don't go for making the perfect retro recreation but rather whatever is the cheapest to make quickly. To make matters even funnier is that Nintendo that is so against anyone making emulators is actually using various open source emulators to run these retro games on the mini consoles and the Wii/Switch virtual console. To make things even funnier they even use the same standard iNES file format to store the ROMs since extracting the rom files out of the virtual console gives you files that are byte to byte identical to the pirated ROMs found online. Most likely these are downloaded from the internet because it would take Nintendo too much work to figure out how to dump the ROM into a format that the open source emulator can read.A lot of these mini consoles do the same thing of packaging up a open source emulator with some pirated ROMs because thats the easiest and quickest way to make a cheap box that plays these retro games.So all in all big game companies don't tend to care about preserving these historic games since its not something that turns big money. Here and there you hear the story of a big game studio shutting down the DRM servers after a few years because they cost money to run while the game was not selling well anymore, thus rendering the game unplayable for the people that did buy it. So piracy is in a way preserving gaming history, but thanks to GOG (GoodOlGames.com) its possible to still legally buy a lot of these old games with the DRM stripped out to make sure they keep working.

author: WyverntekGameRepairs
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 16, 2019, 06:28:02 pm
content: Quote from: Berni on December 16, 2019, 04:08:43 pmYeah, you've got a point there too. In that case, I think it would be best to just wait until my business grows more until I start going to Atari and Sega about possible licensing. The reason I am confident about them accepting it is because I am designing these controllers and accessories to be as original as possible, with the design nearly identical (apart from newer material being used and the lack of logo). I want to make something that doesn't rip off the original, but recreates it in a way that it compliments the original ones instead of screaming "I was made in China with terrible cheap materials with only money in mind!" like so many ripoff and 3rd party controllers do. The only difference in design that is noticeable is the PCB. I design and route my own PCBs to be as high-quality as possible, while maintaining a good price that makes sure the breakeven point doesn't force me to raise the price of the final products. I make sure to pay close attention to details, all the way down to the button feeling.Quote from: Berni on December 16, 2019, 04:08:43 pmYeah, the hypocrisy is downright disturbing. And hilarious. I mean, I get preserving your money by stopping people from distributing illegal copies of your games - but this is just stopping people playing your games period at this point if you're grabbing your own roms and using emulators that supposedly you are taking down and suing people for.Quote from: Berni on December 16, 2019, 04:08:43 pmYeah, and in all honesty it kinda defeats the purpouse of anti-piracy laws. Think about it, these companies are essentially pirating their own games and making money from it.Quote from: Berni on December 16, 2019, 04:08:43 pmYeah, sadly pirating is really the only way to get retro games without the expensive hardware to run it on. If everybody did it as legally as possible, everyone'd have a retro game console collection. And trust me, that gets expensive - I have a collection of my own so I know firsthand.Personally, I think that pirating laws need to be changed up a bit. And by a bit I mean alot.Edit: I just noticed I said "yeah" in the beginning of every reply. Screw it, it's too amusing to change now.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 16, 2019, 07:30:07 pm
content: Well for a start i'm sure the retro gaming community would appreciate copies of controllers that are accurate enough to be hard to tell from the real thing. Especially if its for a console where the original controllers are not known for being reliable in the long term.As for piracy luckily not everyone recognizes it as this "evil monster that will make games unprofitable". The creator of one of the best selling games Minecraft said that poor DRM was put in that game on purpose since he sees piracy as free marketing for his game, yet his game sold over 150 million copies! This means on average every 50th person on earth has bought it. In most recent news the highly anticipated game Cyberpunk 2077 by developer CDProjektRED is going to be released completely DRM free on GOG.com (As in install and play on an unlimited number of PCs without any internet or CD) because the developer says that people who like the game will buy it anyway. But yeah almost everyone else instead stuffs the game chock full of this new Denuvo DRM solution that decrypts the game as its running, consuming so much resources that it makes the game run noticeably slower for the people that bought it.

author: ejeffrey
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 16, 2019, 07:39:59 pm
content: Quote from: WyverntekGameRepairs on December 15, 2019, 10:40:34 pm5% or even 50% of revenue from a niche product like this is not going to be worth the time for a product manager to even think about. It isn't going to be worth their time to work out a legal agreement, and if you have seen the type of legal agreements that companies like this use, you would know why: they imagine everything that could go bad (what if your controller explodes and kills someone? They don't want to be on the hook. Fantastically unlikely: yes. But they don't care and won't do business with you unless you can show that you have insurance which protects them if something goes wrong. And they have to pay a lawyer to think up everything that could go wrong wherease they can send you a cease and desist for a few dollars.Plus, while Nintendo probably wont say it, they would much rather have people buying and playing their current games than messing around with obsolete hardware. If anything they are likely to see hardware that enables vintage games as a threat to their current product line -- no matter how absurd that is.