Bluetooth Arcade Stick with Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting

There is an interest in finding ways to turn renewable resources into electricity. One of the popular ways to produce electricity in energy harvesting is piezoelectricity. The purpose of this study is to incorporate an energy harvesting module to an arcade stick. The said stick can harvest energy just by pressing buttons on it while playing a game. The arcade stick would only work on PCs and not on consoles like PS4 and XboX. The researchers used the common elements of engineering design process by Ford and Coulson. To achieve designing the controller that can integrate with a piezoelectric energy harvester, the arcade stick was built first then the piezoelectric disc transducers are attached to the buttons. The gathered energy from the discs will first be rectified then pass through the energy harvesting module then into the other battery of the stick. The arcade stick still works as a regular arcade stick with a microcontroller serving as the brain for processing button inputs from the user. Then it could send the commands to the game by either USB port or Bluetooth connection using the modified HC-05. For the demonstration of the controller being compatible with any game, a C# game launcher and a fighting game was created using MUGEN. To achieve developing a charging scheme for the controller, there is a main battery and another battery for the harvested energy from the discs. The measured power generated per button press with the piezoelectric disc attached was 3.4mW. The arcade stick equipped with a piezoelectric energy harvester works as intended although the energy generation could be improved if the piezoelectric disk transducer would be of higher grade material which is also more durable.