What happens to obsolete devices? Technological development has advanced at a blistering pace over the last century and that has put us in a situation in which our devices become outdated and impractical in a remarkably short amount of time. The PlayStation 4, for example, is only 11 years old. Yet, many tens of millions of the PS4 consoles around the world are now gathering dust since the release of the PS5. That’s true of the PS4 controllers, too (which, obviously, outnumber the consoles). Instead of letting her old PS4 controllers end up in a landfill, Becky Stern converted them into music sequencers as a gift for Sam Battle.
Stern completed this project for the YouTube Secret Santa gift exchange, in which some of the world’s most popular makers create unique presents for each other. Stern drew Sam Battle in this year’s exchange and you likely know him from the Look Mum No Computer channel. He’s a talented maker and musician with a strong interest in gadgets that make unusual sounds in fun ways. Knowing that, Stern revived a two-year-old PS4 controller project.
The original goal of the project was to replace the PS4 controller’s PCB with a DIY board to introduce new functionality. That project fell by the wayside, but this Secret Santa exchange gave Stern the motivation to finish it. Her vision was simple: make the PS4 controller function as a standalone music sequencer capable of playing loops or one-off samples.
To achieve that, Stern designed a custom PCB to replace the ones inside two faulty PS4 controllers. That PCB had to fit properly and work with all of the existing buttons. Stern also gave herself an additional challenge by choosing to integrate the PS4 controller’s built-in speaker, which the user can select instead of auxiliary audio output if desired.
The custom PCB hosts an Adafruit KB2040 development board, which is based on the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller. Borrowing CircuitPython code and inspiration from a sequencer project by John Park, Stern programmed that board to play the loops and samples according to button presses. In the case of the loops, pressing a corresponding button simply mutes or unmutes the track and so they stay in sync with the beat. As a special personalization, Stern used samples that Battle himself created and makes available for download online.
Of course, the PS4 controllers were also customized in fun colors. One of the two even has a Furby ear attached — something that will make sense to fans of Look Mum No Computer.
