Well Arbitrary Day is nearly upon us – and if you don’t know what that is here is a small excerpt from Reddit Gifts:

“Arbitrary Day is the celebration that takes place at the half-life of Christmas – June 25th. It’s just an awesome excuse for strangers to mail each other presents, and then talk about it on the Internet.”

Of course being a keen redditor who also took part in the Reddit Secret Santa project I just had to sign up for it. Home made gifts are highly encouraged (and normally well received) for this give-athon. I made my giftee a rage t-shirt for Secret Santa which I though was pretty neat – until I saw all the awesome home made things other people got. I swear the users of that website are an untapped source of imagination and artistry mixed in with a bit of cunning and a lot of bacon.

I was thinking about doing the same kinda thing for A.D. but knew that I wouldn’t be able to make any decisions until I was matched with my giftee. Half the fun is trying figure out a good gift for the person you finally get by becoming their personal e-stalker. You start out by googling their name, then you check out their address on Gmaps. Next comes the Facebook and MySpace searches, which can sometimes hold a wealth of usable information. And then comes the arduous task of pouring over all their previous Reddit posts and comments.

Well after my bout of obsessive stalking I had found out a few good bits of info about my victim giftee. I’m not going to post anything I found out on here due to the 1 in 6 billion chance that they (or any other living soul) comes across this post. The only thing I will say is that they own an Xbox 360 – which means they play games. This is great news for me as I started feeling that making another t-shirt would be a bit of a cop out.

Instead I thought I’d try my hand at something that I think I first saw on Instructables, although it could’ve been somewhere else for all I know. Put simply, it was an old NES controller that connected to a PC via USB and held a compendium of NES games and an emulator on it. I remember drooling over the video of it and always wanting to try it out for myself.

Unfortunately I don’t have any old NES controllers lying around, so I thought I’d try it out with a standard PS2 style gamepad instead. So I went down to my local electronics store and got myself some supplies, which consisted of:

USB gamepad

4 port USB hub (smallest one I could find)

Mini USB cable

4 GB USB flash memory

I figured it would be a simple enough job; Connect the controller and the memory to the hub, connect the hub to the USB cable and then jam it all inside the controllers housing. Before I started any connecting I decided to try and lay out where the components would go. As you can probably tell from the pictures below there isn’t really a lot of free space inside those things, and the hub/memory are relatively bulky.

Even after cutting away some of the interior plastic supports there was still no room to fit them. I ended up having to remove all the USB sockets from the hub and stripping the memory down to the board itself. Surprisingly now this was done it all fitted perfectly, albeit in different parts of the case. Now it was just a case of soldering everything together. I’m not the best at this, but I think I did a reasonable job.

Obviously I couldn’t possibly put 3.7 GB of game ROMs onto the flash drive, as that would be illegal. But I can put on some of the legal emulators and make a simple autorun start menu for them in Director.

And so the hardest part of this whole thing is left. I now have to wrap it and mail it without too much procrastination in between. I have less than two weeks to make this happen, but hopefully I’ll get off my arse and do it tomorrow…. or Friday. Yeah, Friday sounds good. I just hope that my giftee likes it at least a little bit, and that I haven’t gone off at a tangent with this.

Fingers crossed, and Happy Arbitrary Day!

Update: I’ll be putting together a proper how-to with more pictures for this so that you can make one if so inclined.

Update 2: If you want to buy one click here!