Someone turned a kid’s toy into a game controller with a Raspberry Pi, and it’s really cool

What would you do if you got your hands on a cheap electronic kid’s toy? If you’re a tinkerer like most of the Raspberry Pi community is, there are probably a thousand and one different ways you could turn a cheap plastic device into something grander with a few extra boards, a bit of soldering, and some programming. As it turns out, someone has discovered that a $5 toy makes for an excellent video game controller if you tweak it correctly. But here’s the best bit: the process is so noninvasive that you can revert it back to its original toy state if you want.

Someone turns a $5 Paw Patrol steering wheel into a video game controller

In an interview with Tom’s Hardware, the device’s creator, Dr. Tom Tilley, shared what inspired him to do this project. When he saw the $5 Paw Patrol toy steering wheel in a thrift shop, he had the grand idea of using a Raspberry Pico to turn it into a video game controller – something that our own Daniel Allen has done in the past. He used the Pi to send his controls over to a laptop emulating the game Super Hang-On to create a pretty cool arcade-like experience.

It may be disheartening to see someone take something that could bring a kid joy and turn it into a controller, but fret not. Dr. Tom Tilley took the utmost care to preserve the original hardware within the toy while creating this project. The only irreversible damage done to the toy is a small drilled hole created to power the Raspberry Pi within the shell. Other than that, Dr. Tom Tilley states that you can always revert the toy back to its original hardware when it’s the kids go to take the handlebars.

If this got your nostalgia for retro games aflame, why not check out when someone resurrected a PS1 with a Raspberry Pi?