Making the Playstacean

[GingerOfOz]

The "Playstacean" is a really cool art concept by the artist "AnhDangerous", and I've been obsessed with it since I saw it on Twitter a couple of months ago.

Unfortunately, it only exists as pixels on a screen. And as an art print... and a shirt I suppose. But nobody with soldering and CAD abilities has wasted their time transforming a real PSOne into a Playstacean. Thank goodness I'm here with some time to waste, we'll see about the rest.

The plan is to make a Playstacean as 1:1 with the original artwork as much as possible. The project is still early on, but here's what's been accomplished so far:

I've got a PSOne modded with all the mods that the final build will have. The mods will be pretty light overall. There's a PSNee installed to run backup discs off of.

No full ODE for this project, as I want the original disc drive to stay functional (XStation won't do that) and don't really want to hand wire potentially 150 wires to get a PSIO up and running on a PSOne. Burned discs will do me fine for now.

I considered picking up a RetroGem for HDMI output, but the price tag is tough to swallow right now. I picked up a $40 CRT off of Facebook Marketplace and will use that as my "authentic video mod" for now. A quality Retrotink or similar scaler might end up being my solution for modern displays, as I can justify the expense with a "yeah this'll work for every retro console I could ever own".

I also threw together a PicoMemcard+ as my memory card solution. It looks like there are slicker options out there for home consoles, but this will work fine for now. I plan on designing my own shell for the PCB that'll suit the Playstacean theme.

Then I need to make my own "mod": the crab controls on the shell. The plan is to frankenstein a broken Dualshock 2, a 3rd party Dualshock, and a little multiplexer board together to allow me to toggle between the crab controls and the player 1 port. We're going light on the custom PCBs this time, just a couple of simple ones for the sticks and the switching circuit.

The soldering and assembly for this build should be pretty straightforward. The real challenge is modeling every piece of the crab in CAD. After starting over half a dozen times, I finally got an overall shape that I'm happy with.

The overall shell is a bit chunkier, partially because that's how the artwork looks, and partially because the artwork has the memcard and controller ports angled, so a bit of extra height is needed to accommodate that. The slope from the bottom of the case up to the orange is going to make trimming the PSOne motherboard a necessity, but I should be able to get away with cutting off the ground planes on the sides without too many issues (I hope).

The face and pincers are still going to be tricky, but I'm sure that I can get those properly modeled, even if I have to start over half a dozen times on those. My hope is that this will be a fun, couple of weeks type of project, so expect more updates soon!

 

[GingerOfOz]

Ah, a couple of weeks, a couple of months, if you think in centuries they're basically the same.

The process of modeling the crab took way longer than anticipated. The CAD work was a real challenge, but it was really satisfying to work out the issues with each piece. I ended up getting a little more comfortable with the loft tool, and was happy to have a reason to use the "mirror entire part" button in Inventor. I would have liked to better nail the look of the eyes and get more details on each piece of the controller arms, but I think he still looks pretty good, simple as he may be.

I did NOT want to do any post-processing on the 3D prints for this project, so I spent a decent amount of time experimenting with angles and supports. This custom raft system from @Wesk was lightning fast compared to any other orientation I tried, with the added bonus of not needing to spend time removing supports. Definitely a system I want to use in the future for prototypes at the very least.

The finish wasn't as clean with just the raft as I would've liked, so I went back to trying more traditional supports. With FDM printing, one angle had to be ugly no matter what, so I tried to condense the ugliness to the back half of the shell. This orientation worked really well, and I don't mind too much if my crab has a bit of an ugly butt.

There were a couple of issues with the controller stuff. First, I had to switch from using digital muxes to analog muxes, because I didn't know that the direction of the signal matters when using digital muxes. Thank to @YveltalGriffin for pointing that out. With the analog muxes, the port controller worked fine, but the crab controller put out random inputs. @Customledmods told me that the 3rd party controllers spam random inputs when there's no joysticks connected, and sure enough it started working much more consistently once I reattached the joysticks! The blue controller board did still have some random disconnect issues, so I swapped in a different, green 3rd party controller board. There weren't any issues after that.

The angled ports on the front were a real pain as well. My player 1 ports lined up pretty much perfectly and could be soldered at a bit of an angle as is without any fanfare. At some point, something got screwed up the the positioning of player 2 ports, so they were slightly off and wouldn't fit in the board and the case at the same time. I ended up running wires for everything on the P2 port, and secured it in place with a handful of 3D prints to keep it from moving. The ports feel surprisingly robust, if a touch tighter than the typical setup.

The custom Picomemcard shell was fun to make. I used a 0.2mm nozzle to get some of the details, though it certainly increased the print time a fair bit. A couple weeks later, this SD2PSX popped up on Aliexpress. I might go back and tweak my shell to be able to fit the hardware from one of these in the future.

The final assembly was pretty smooth, all things considered. A handful of minor things needed to be tweaked, but there wasn't a "have to start all over" moment.

I used PETG for the orange pieces of the crab to try and give the ball and socket joint some resistance. This worked really well at the start, but the arm are already pretty loose after just a couple of weeks. I dunno if there's a good solution for keeping him nice and stiff, but I'll survive if he's a little loose.

I'll go and make a cutting edge post at some point too, just wanted to be sure to document my issues before I forgot them all.

 

[cy]

This really came out beautifully! I totally get what you mean about getting to mirror things. I was tempted to mirror the right side of my Cyxty Four once I had the buttons figured out, but working with the left side scan ended up being a better choice. I'm so glad you were able to save yourself a ton of work and mirror the claws though! The general similarities between the two controller halves definitely seemed like they would've helped!

Learning about the multiplexer board was also rather enlightening. I feel like I might have use for something like that in one of my future projects. Overall, I loved watching your journey with building this! Beautiful work as always Ginger!

 

[cy]

Sorry for the double post, but I did want to bump this thread and ask what layer height and what angle(if you know) was this project this printed at? After seeing how nice the shell turned out at MGC, I'd like to try something similar to this sometime. I'm also curious to know how long the the top and bottom took to print.

 

[GingerOfOz]

I dunno the angle, it was very steep. I did 0.08mm later height, top and bottom took a while to print, but I don't remember the times