A week ago a bluetooth wireless controller went on sale at GameStop for $8. I bought one and ripped it apart with the intention of stuffing it inside a Super Nintendo controller. Thankfully the whole thing fit perfectly and works great with my Fire TV.

I wanted this controller to be completely wireless (which meant a lot of internal wiring ironically enough), so I also incorporated a Qi receiver. Yep, wireless charging for a bluetooth SNES controller. The best part about this? The bluetooth controller from GameStop cost me $8 ($24 if you include the two I’ve potentially fried) and the Qi receiver cost me a whopping $4. Don’t get me wrong, it was a pain to wire this whole thing up, but that’s still really cheap. I can’t speak for the speed of charging the battery in this controller since I haven’t run it down yet, but the controller’s battery is a small LiPo cell rated at 3.7V @ 450mAh. The Qi receiver claims to output 700mA and the battery charge time calculator I used put it around 45 minutes to charge up the controller. Here’s another picture of the internals:

You can see the Qi receiver in the top half of the shell and the rest of the gamepad in the lower half. The green board is the GameStop controller and the orange board underneath it is the original SNES PCB. One interesting thing to note, most of the green board is just space. There’s some electronics to handle the charging of the battery, but the logic and bluetooth is controlled by the angled piece soldered to the board. Anyway, I know pictures don’t really give the greatest idea of how the finish product looks and works, so here’s a video!

I’m hoping that I will be able to combine the two extra fried controllers I had into one working board so I could implement this same thing on a N64 controller. If I can’t there’s absolutely TONS of cheap bluetooth controllers out there that could be sacrificed for the greater good.