When starting this project I didn't expect to end up down the rabbit hole I did, I was aware of companies who made arcade controllers for Japanese arcade games and I was naive to think I could just buy a cabinet. Both of these are technically right but for jubeat it's a little harder, there was a controller by a company called DJ Dao who I was familiar with their work but not by direct name, however this controller has been long discontinued and I couldn't find any for sale online. I then looked at buying a cabinet, most cabinets are imported into the US and these looked to set me back over a $1000 which at the beginning of this project I wasn't prepared for. I also didn't have room for a full cabinet, didn't want to take the chance it'd survive the trip and most importantly the price still being over $1000.

So the next logical step for me was to see if I could find a way of building my own controller and using an emulator to get a close experience.

I found a few good sources within my research which I've also archived in the wayback if the below links don't work

• kokoa love | Language: 🇯🇵
• FlipFlop JP | Language: 🇯🇵
• Makoto Workshop | Language: 🇫🇷
• Reddit Discussion on Screens | Language: 🇬🇧

The above links are to various sources I used within my research, these were people either making their own Jubeat controllers and documenting their progress (like I am) or breakdowns of the DJ Dao controller which inspired my final design. I also created a mood board of various different Jubeat controller designs that later inspired my final product.

Next the software, again I won't go into this as it's a very grey area but again this post was very helpful in searching, I used duckduckgo as the results yielded better than Google due to my region being UK and a lot of these articles are written in Japanese.

Now there was one final piece I had to workout, how do I learn electronics… That's right, I have minimal experience with electronics and zero experience with manufacturing. How I overcame these can be found in the Build process article.

The series:

• Introduction
• Initial Research
• Costings
• Build process
• Footnotes