The Surprisingly Nice and Authentic Feeling Dirt Cheap Spinner for Arcade Emulation

It's easy enough to find joysticks and buttons for arcade emulation but a decent spinner can be harder to find - until now!

With some stuff you have around the house or can be bought at the local dollar store you can have a surprisingly nice, responsive usb based spinner.

The secret - a friction push toy car. This is the kind of car that you push and will slowly keep moving along at about the same speed for a bit. One of the tires will be your spinner knob and one of them sits in front of the sensor on an optical mouse to pick up the motion.

The flywheel and gear mechanism help to simulate the feel of an actual arcade spinner. Specifically you get that momentum so you can spin, release, let it spin for a second on it's own then grab it. Feel the stop and then spin again or in the opposite direction. Or when required still make those subtle moves just a little left, a little right...

The tire itself can be used as a nice grip on the player side but if you would like something larger and a more realistic feel - the lid from a jug of orange juice or windshield washer antifreeze can be glued on.

If you can find more than one type of the cars - usually they have at lease one - try and get the one with the most resistance when you turn the wheels. At least for me that is the one with the best feel.

Supplies

The secret - a friction push toy car from the dollar store. This is the kind of car that you push and will slowly keep moving along at about the same speed for a bit. be careful not to get a pull back and release fast car. You want the kind that has a small flywheel and reduction gears inside that keeps the momentum going.

An optical mouse - you are going to want a corded optical mouse for this - changing batteries is going to be a pain if you go cordless.

Hot glue. There is probably a better way to mount this - but hot glue is what I used and it is working well so far.

Something to mount it on if you don't have a control panel already

Step 1: Start by Ruining an Optical Mouse

Strip apart a mouse - and get rid of most everything. All you need is the sensor and the lens. Glue the lens back on. Light from the mouse illuminates the surface, in this case it will be the tire from your toy car and the reflection is picked up by a small camera. So glue them together you have all you need.

For the more adventurous types you can always wire up the mouse buttons to arcade buttons, but I chose not to as I will be using a couple of joysticks and a bunch of buttons and a separate encoder

Step 2: Now Trash the Toy

The little tank I found has the sort of flywheel gear setup you need. This can be seen in the second picture. I found this one a little too lightweight for me so I went with one I had sitting around for the past few moths. This one I never took a picture of before I tore into it. Mostly the same idea but it was a four wheel drive. So I had cut off the wheel I didn't need. Spin a wheel and it continues to spin with a satisfying sound and feel - that's what you want.

Step 3: Now Glue Them to Something

The mouse is mounted vertically through a hole in a piece of wood I had kicking around. Lots of hot glue and popsicle sticks to hold everything together and keep it in place. Important that before you glue it to the final position you test it to make sure the mouse is picking up the wheel and moving back and forth as desired and required. The black wheels are not always the easiest thing for the mouse to pick up on. One way to correct this is to remove the tire and wrap the wheel with tape of any sort to the desired thickness. Mine seems to be picking up ok, but if ever it does not I will be using blue duct tape for a few reasons

1) not as reflective as the silver

2) I happen to have blue duct tape

3) I like blue

So not good reasons, but anything to break the tie

Step 4: What to Use As a Knob

The tire itself actually isn't so bad. I used one for the most part while experimenting with this the first time

The cap from an orange juice container (not pictured)works well and is white - if you like white.

The cap shown is from a bottle of windshield wiper antifreeze. Cut the little tab that keeps it kid proof off and you have an almost perfect spinner knob

The last one is one I printed. I can probably find the file around here somewhere - but odds are it won't fit your car/tires.

Whatever you use make sure it is centered so there is no wobble.

Step 5: Time to Play

Now that you know how - you can mount it to a control panel of almost any sort. The one I have here is for a mame machine in progress bit I have also in the past just glued the spinning wheels to a mouse and used a hand held version.

Took that apart to make this one - sorry - no pics that was a while ago.

Whatever you are using as your emulator you will need to tune the mouse to better play the games you want. Your spinner may be moving in he X direction and you need Y, direction may need to be reversed and you might need to change sensitivity. Now that you know to look for them - easy to find and easy to fix.

Step 6: Try It to Believe It!

I played around in the past with the old PS/2 mice mounting them to control panel pictured here, then extending the optical encoders onto an old hard drive I stripped apart. while it had close to the right feel thanks to the weight of the disk and the bearings it was awkward, fell apart too often and it is getting hard to find the right mouse to do that with. Sadly the PS/2 mice don't plug into raspberry pi's USB port.

You may also notice in at least one of the pictures above all kinds of buttons and a pair of joysticks not yet wired up that I neglected to mention. Simple reason for that is - there is a lot of information out there how to build arcade emulators. From simple to sophisticated. Using old keyboards or using dedicated encoders. They can explain the rest of it better than I can and in more detail. Certainly can be an interesting thing to look up. What I haven't seen is anyone that has come up with a better spinner!

One day in a dollar store I was looking for something that would spin, just to see if I could make a slightly better version when I picked up some random toy car that had that friction drive. Tried it and was downright amazed just how close it felt to what I was looking for.

I had pretty much everything I needed except that car - pretty easy to find spare mice. So at the time the build cost me $1.25 in extra materials. Sadly with inflation that store is now up to $1.50 for most items - but I feel it is still worth it!