Ben Heck Tears Down a Cheap Knock-Off of His Own Handheld Console Design
In his most recent video, Heck performs an in-depth teardown of knock-off of his own console design and explains what he found.
You know you’ve finally made it when companies start churning out cheap rip-offs of your designs. Ben Heck is one of the godfathers of console modding and has been hacking and building devices for decades now. Some of his designs, like one-handed controllers for the Microsoft Xbox One and Sony PlayStation 4, are available for sale through his website, but most of his projects are one-off builds. Nearly 20 years ago, before YouTube, accessible 3D printing, and user-friendly development boards, Heck designed a handheld SNES console. Heck recently discovered that a company was manufacturing and selling a knock-off of that design, and so he bought one to teardown in his most recent video.
Heck found out about this knock-off handheld console when a fan came across it for sale on Amazon — it was even available with Prime shipping! Anyone even remotely acquainted with these kinds of devices will immediately recognize it as one of those awful brandless handhelds that comes with a bunch of generic video games built in. Heck’s original design was capable of actually running Nintendo SNES games, which this can’t do. But the physical design is an obvious copy of Heck’s. The knock-off is much smaller than the original and was manufactured using conventional injection molding, as opposed to Heck’s handcrafted construction. It also shipped in appropriately low-effort packaging, complete with poorly-translated ad copy. Otherwise, the resemblance is unmistakable.
After a short description of his original build, Heck dives right into evaluating the knock-off. It came with several games already installed, all of which are as dull and lifeless as you’d expect. To the manufacturer’s credit, however, most of the games at least appear to be somewhat original. Heck then tears down the console and provides an in-depth explanation of the hardware used. The PCB contains all of the typical components that you’d expect, though they aren’t as cheap as Heck had assumed they would be. Frankly, we have serious doubts that anyone has actually bought this knock-off handheld — it would likely gather dust even on a dollar store shelf. But it is really fun to see the meta experience of Heck tearing down a knock-off of his own design. As he says “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” and it’s hard to imagine imitation more glaring than a company mass-producing your design.