Arcade Controller Board

The Arcade Controller Board is the custom ESP32-C6 carrier PCB behind the RookiDroid Arcade Controller. Joystick header, button header, battery terminal, power switch and the 9 V step-down are all on one board, so a real arcade joystick and five microswitch buttons become a WiFi robot remote without a breadboard or a single soldered joint. Plug in the joystick harness, run one wire per button, flash the open-source sketch, and your hexapod answers to the stick.

Arcade Hardware, Straight In

Arcade parts are plain switches — but nine of them, a battery and a microcontroller usually means a nest of wiring. This board is laid out so that wiring is trivial and hard to get wrong.

• Dedicated joystick header: a 5-pin connector takes the joystick’s stock harness — all four directions and their common ground in one plug, no crimping.
• Labelled button header: a 2×7 header carries the five button GPIOs plus ground, 5 V and VIN pins, so each button is one wire to its signal pin and one to any ground.
• Internal pull-ups, no debounce circuitry: every input is just a switch to ground. The firmware handles the rest, and the command is re-sent every 50 ms anyway.
• On-board power: a 2-pin screw terminal takes a 9 V battery snap connector, an on-board buck converter turns it into a clean 5 V rail, and a slide switch cuts it all.

Key Specs

• Microcontroller: ESP32-C6 SuperMini — 2.4 GHz WiFi, USB-C for flashing
• Joystick header: 5-pin, mapped to GP0–GP3 plus ground
• Button header: 2×7, with the five button inputs on GP14, GP15, GP18, GP19 and GP20, alongside GND, 5 V and VIN pins
• Power input: 2-pin screw terminal for a 9 V battery, with a Mini360 buck converter to 5 V and a slide power switch on the board
• Status LED: the SuperMini’s WS2812 RGB LED on GP8 — green when connected, red when the link drops
• Control: 6-byte binary UDP packets to the robot’s access point at 192.168.4.1:1234, sent at 20 Hz
• Compatibility: drives Hexapod Nougat, Mochi and Macaroon — they share one protocol
• Mounting: M2 screw holes matching the printed arcade body
• Firmware: open-source Arduino sketch, MIT licensed

What’s Included

• 1 × Arcade Controller Board — buck converter, power switch, screw terminal and both headers already assembled and tested
• Not included: the arcade joystick, the five push buttons, the 9 V battery and its connector, and the printed cabinet — the cabinet is a free download

Why This Board

• No soldering: headers, terminal and power section are assembled. Plug the joystick in and push spade connectors onto the button wires.
• One battery, no regulator to source: a single 9 V cell runs the whole remote, stepped down on-board.
• Fits the printed cabinet: mounting holes and connector positions line up with the arcade body, with the USB-C port left reachable for flashing.
• Wireless from day one: the remote joins the robot’s own access point — no router, no pairing, no app.
• One remote, three robots: point the sketch at Nougat, Mochi or Macaroon by changing a single line.
• Open hardware: the wiring diagram, pin map and firmware are all public on GitHub.

Getting Started

1. Print the cabinet from the free 3D print files and mount the board in the body with four M2×4mm screws.
2. Plug the joystick harness into the 5-pin header, then run one wire from each button to its GPIO on the 2×7 header and one to any GND pin.
3. Screw the 9 V snap connector into the terminal block, minding polarity.
4. Install Arduino IDE 2.x, add the esp32 board package (3.x or newer) and the Adafruit NeoPixel library.
5. Open arcade.ino, set ssid to your robot’s network, select ESP32C6 Dev Module, and upload over USB-C.
6. Power the robot up first, then the remote. The LED turns green when the link is live — push the stick and it walks.

Safety: check the 9 V polarity twice before the first power-up. The screw terminal will happily accept reversed leads, and that can destroy the buck converter and the ESP32-C6.

Open hardware, open firmware. Plug it in and take the controls.