Building Controllers

Hey, I’m back. In the previous blog post I talked about my experiences growing up with smash, but that entire time from when I had my first shitty third party controller, I have been modding controllers as well! 

Here is a picture of the first controller I made for my brother:

Okay yeah so I didn’t really know what I was doing but it's honestly held up pretty well considering I spray painted it like a decade ago. I have always loved taking things apart to see how things work and sometimes could even put them back together. I started putting LEDs and adding snapback capacitors in my controller to make it the cleanest it could be. This was the controller I rocked while I went 3-2 at my local scene throughout high school. I probably replaced the insides and components over 5 times during this period:

Right before I went off to college 2017 something new entered the smash scene: the original b0xx controller. Outside of all the drama between the smashbox and b0xx I was instantly fascinated with this controller that looked unlike anything I had ever seen. I wanted to try one hella bad and even ended up reaching out to Hax over twitter to help in any way I could. I never got a response though so rip. 

I ended up taking a break from smash during college, but in 2021 I graduated with a BS in electrical engineering and wanted to get back into smash and learn more about these controllers. I wanted to buy one but quickly realized that every vendor was out of stock.I figured that with the tools and knowledge I had gained, I could make my own. A huge shout out to cranes lab and everyone in the DIY community for being so awesome and helpful when I was starting out. I ended up spending a couple weeks building one to try it out, and the first ICEBOX controller was born:

This wasn’t supposed to be a business, but after I shared my controller with some friends and a couple of them asked if I could make them ones. I also had a mentor suggest I look into starting my own business and I thought I would give it a try. A bunch of iterations later, I ended up here with the current version of ICEBOX:

I’m super happy with it and my hope is that I can just design and build controllers all day. My goal is to have someone will a super major with one of my controllers but I’m a ways off from that.

Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to my story of controllers and have a nice day!

Regards,

Luca Gacy