DIY Game Controller

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Workshop at the GIG Makerspace

Controllers are part of every gaming console but only very few people know how they are build. Samer Shawar, founder of the first Palestinian hackerspace, was at the Global Innovation Gathering (GIG) Makerspace to show us how.

One and a half years ago, Samer Shawar founded the Vecbox hackerspace – first and currently only hackerspace in Palestine. Ever since, your Palestinians have been gathering in a loft to build robot hands and code computer games. Through the hackerspace, Shawar seeks to enable young people in Palestine to work hands-on with tech, bringing together art and technology. “Palestinians have few spaces to be creative in”, says Samer Shawar. Vecbox is a-political but “is a space for creation, creativity and critique”, comments co-founder Dalia Othman.

At re:publica TEN, Samer Shawar led a workshops to show other makers how to build and configure their very own controllers using Arduino micro-controllers and the Processing programming language. At the maker bench, participants wired up breadboards and coupled together green and red cables. Aim of the workshop was to be able to play a match of “Pong” (the classic game of 1972), using a self-built controller.

Image: re:publica/Gregor Fischer (CC BY 2.0)

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