Picade Max USB Controller board supports two joysticks and up to 30 arcade buttons

Pimoroni Picade Max USB Controller is a Raspberry Pi RP2040 board designed for arcade game consoles with support for two joysticks and up to 30 buttons through standard DuPont socket connectors and one Plasma button connector.

The board comes with a 2MB QSPI flash for the firmware, a USB-C port for power and programming, one of DuPont socket connectors exposes three ADC inputs, 3.3V, and GND, and there’s also a Qwicc/Qt STEMMA connector for I2C module expansion, plus BOOT and RESET buttons for programming.

 

Picade Max USB Controller specifications:

• Microcontroller – Raspberry Pi RP2040 dual-core Arm Cortex M0+ MCU @ 133 MHz with 264kB of SRAM
• Storage – 2MB QSPI flash supporting XiP
• USB – 1x USB Type-C port for power and programming
• User inputs
  • DuPont socket connectors
    • 2x 4-way joystick inputs
    • 30x arcade button inputs
  • Plasma button connector
• Expansion
  • Qw/ST (Qwiic/STEMMA QT) connector for I2C modules
  • 3x ADC inputs up to 3.3V via DuPont socket connector
• Misc – Reset and Boot buttons, status RGB LED
• Power Supply – 5V via USB-C port
• Dimensions – TBD

The company provides the pico-multi-endpoint-gamepads firmware written in C, but users could also develop custom firmware with MicroPython or CircuitPython if they wished to. It can be connected to a computer, Raspberry Pi, or other SBC running Windows, Mac OS, or Linux to build your own arcade game console. While the Picade Max USB Controller is shown as being new on the Pinmoroni website, it looks like it’s already been sold as part of the company’s Picade Max game console for Raspberry Pi 5 with a 19-inch display and plenty of buttons.

Tom’s Hardware has published a recent review of the game console, and they were quite satisfied, with the main downside being the price: about $524 without Raspberry Pi 5. That’s probably why the company decided to sell the Picade Max USB Controller separately so that users can create their own game console at a lower price, or even retrofit an old arcade game console.

The Picade Max USB Controller sells for around $20 US (the exact price depends on GBP to USD exchange rate), and if you don’t have your own buttons and joystick there’s also an arcade parts kit.  If you want some fancy LED buttons on your console, you may also consider adding Plasma buttons, although it adds to the cost quite a lot at around $60 for 10 buttons.

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