[Niko1499] had a plan. He’d built a cool hardware controller for the game Kerbal Space Program (KSP). He got a lot of positive reaction to it and decided to form a company to produce them. As many people have found out, though, that’s easier said than done, and the planned company fell short of its goals. However, [Niko1499] has taken his controller and documented a lot about its construction, including some of the process he used to get there.
If you haven’t run into it before, KSP is sort of half simulator, half game. You take command of an alien space program and develop it, plan and execute missions, and so on. The physics simulation is quite realistic, and the game has a large following.
When we first saw the photos, we thought it was an old Heathkit trainer, and–indeed–the case is from an old Heathkit. However, the panel is laser cut, and the software is Arduino-based. [Niko1499] covers a few different methods of letting the Arduino control the game by emulating a joystick, a keyboard, or by using some software to take serial data and use it to control the game.
The project isn’t quite an exact how-to, although he does provide a bill of materials and the software. However, you’ll surely want to customize the layout to fit your case and your preferences anyway.
We are always surprised we don’t see more dedicated hardware control panels for popular software like Gimp (or Photoshop) or video editing. Faking mouse and keyboard input is pretty simple and having dedicated buttons for common functions could be pretty productive if you plan it out right.
We have, however, seen a number of controllers for KSP for quite a while. Of course, everyone has their own take on exactly what one should look like.
Filed under: Arduino Hacks
Read the full article here by Hack a Day
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