Hacking a Fisher-Price Gamepad to Make It Functional

There is a weird overlap between the tech industry and the toy industry in the form of toy gadgets that resemble the real thing, but clunkier and in kid-enticing colors. When cell phones were still exciting, toy companies sold fake cell phone toys that beeped and booped, but couldn’t make calls. In a similar vein, Fisher-Price makes a little “pretend video game controller” for kids that lights up and makes sounds. To keep his daughter from ruining his real gamepads when she experienced an interesting in gaming, YouTuber Retrograde Scene converted that Fisher-Price controller into a real working device.

The Fisher-Price controller costs less than ten bucks and is meant to give infants an entertaining way to build fine motor skills. It has no connectivity hardware and therefore can’t actually work with video game consoles or computers. But it does have a PCB inside with real buttons to activate the light and sound effects. All Retrograde Scene had to do was tap into those buttons, read the presses, and then send them to a computer to control a game. By doing that, his young daughter can play video games with him using the kid-friendly Fisher-Price controller instead of gumming up a nice first-party gamepad.

The key to this conversion was the addition of a DFRobot FireBeetle ESP32-based IoT (Internet of Things) microcontroller development board. Like the famous Arduino Uno board, the FireBeetle can easily detect button presses — including the buttons on the Fisher-Price controller’s PCB. But it has the added benefit of on-chip Bluetooth and WiFi adapters, which allow for both wireless configuration and connections to computers/game consoles. Retrograde Scene made tapped into the buttons by soldering wires to the PCB’s pads and the Fire Beetle’s GPIO pins and ground pin. When the player pushes a button, it completes the circuit and pulls the GPIO pin low so the ESP32 detects the action.

The vast majority of the work here went into fitting the FireBeetle board inside the Fisher-Price controller enclosure. It takes advantage of the handy ESP32-BLE-Gamepad library, which handles all of the tricky work of Bluetooth connections. It even provides a user interface that players can access from their smartphones to reconfigure button profiles.

Sadly, this work was all for naught, as the kiddo in question lost interest in video games and moved onto unicorns.