I'm building a really small mame cabinet, using a tiny joystick (This one in particular) and I bought a bunch of cheap (~$1) buttons figuring anything would be OK.

The joystick is great. The buttons, not so much. You can't flap with those buttons, they're hard to push and half the time they don't even register a press. So I set out to design my own. I ordered a bunch of ebay mouse-micro switches like:THESE and designed a few button shells.

Here's the final product, the first one I printed. Still have the old crappy buttons in there too for comparison. The new one works great, terrific feel and just enough throw to feel right.




I did the design in openscad (which is an open source, freely downloadable script based CAD program) and printed it with a fairly cheap printerbot. If anybody wants the source files or the stls, let me know and I'll publish them somewhere for download.

I still plan on doing some smoothing work, maybe an acetone vapor treatment to smooth it out, but it came out pretty good (the buttons fit a 1/2" mounting hole).

Dave