Piper's Matthew Matz Picks the Raspberry Pi Pico — and Piper Make — to Upcycle a $7 Vintage Joystick

Developer Matthew Matz is making the most of the Piper Make visual coding environment his company recently launched for the Raspberry Pi Pico — by bringing an old joystick back to life.

Launched back in March, Piper Make is a block-based visual coding environment designed for use with the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller development board. While free for anyone to use by providing their own hardware, it's also at the heart of a hardware-to-your-door subscription service dubbed the Piper Monthly Makers Club.

"With the easy drag-and-drop coding interface and projects on our Piper Make platform," company co-founder Shree Bose said at the time, "the true magic becomes what our users will be able to create and share with the world."

Matthew Matz is no stranger to the platform: As lead developer on Piper Make, he helped build it — and it's become a go-to tool for fixing a range of problems.

"Converted a joystick from the 90's I found at Goodwill for $7 to USB using a Raspberry Pi Pico and Piper Make," Matz writes on Twitter. "Added an LED and a button for the Boot Select on the Pico. Super fun and surprisingly easy :) I'm surprised how good gameplay is with it!"

The Piper Make platform is based on Google's Blockly framework, but wasn't the first visual coding environment to launch for the popular Raspberry Pi Pico: That honor goes to BIPES, which released two weeks earlier.

The Piper Make environment is available to use now on the official website. Matz, meanwhile, has not yet shared a schematic or code for his joystick conversion project.