Planet Arduino

[Matthew Peverill] is a busy PhD student who loves to make time for a little Kerbal Space Program. He was tired of using such pedestrian controls as a keyboard and mouse for such important work, and wanted something a little more like they have down in Houston.

For this project, he’s focusing on the inputs more than anything else. The intent is not to play solely from this control panel, but to strike a balance between fun inputs and accurate control without screwing up favorite game play modes. It’s based on an Arduino Due, and uses some custom I²C multiplexer boards to wrangle all the various inputs.

We love the look of this panel, especially the appropriately Futura-fonted labels and all the toggle switches. Matthew took inspiration and guidance for this project from a couple of sources, so he’s definitely following in the Hackaday spirit of standing on the shoulders of giants. He’s moved through two prototypes and is working out the bugs before making the next one. The final version will be made of backlit transparent acrylic, and you know we can’t wait to see that.

What, you don’t have access to a laser cutter? Just build a control panel into an old Heathkit trainer or something.

If you have even the most passing interest in space and what it takes to get there, you’ve probably already played Kerbal Space Program (KSP). If you haven’t, then you should set aside about ten hours today to go check that out real quick. Don’t worry, Hackaday will still be here when you get back. Right now you need to focus on getting those rockets built and establishing a network of communication satellites so you can get out of low orbit.

For those of you who’ve played the game (or are joining us again after playing KSP for the prescribed 10, 12, 16 hours), you’ll know that the humble computer keyboard is not very well suited to jaunts through space. You really want a joystick and throttle at the absolute minimum for accurate maneuvers, but even you’ll be spending plenty of time back on the keyboard to operate the craft’s various systems. If you want the ultimate KSP control setup, you’ll need to follow in the footsteps of [Hugo Peeters] and build your own. Luckily for us, he’s written up an exceptionally well detailed guide on building KSP controllers that should prove useful even if you don’t want to clone his.

At the most basic level, building a KSP controller consists of hooking a bunch of switches and buttons to a microcontroller such as the Arduino or Teensy, and converting those to USB HID key presses that the game understands. This works fine up to a point, but is limited because it’s only a one-way method of communication. For his controller, [Hugo] forked KSPSerialIO, a plugin for KSP that allows bidirectional communication between the game and your controller, enabling things like digital readouts of speed and fuel levels on the controller’s panel.

Once the logistics of how you’ll talk to the game are settled, the rest is really up to the individual. The first step in building your own KSP controller is deciding what you want it to do. Are you looking to fly planes? Control a rover? Maybe you just want a master control panel for your space station. There’s a whole lot of things you can build in KSP, and the layout, inputs, and displays on your controller should ideally reflect your play style.

[Hugo] went with a fairly general purpose panel, but did spend quite a bit of extra time to get some slick LED bar graphs hooked up to display resource levels of different systems on his craft. That’s an extra step that isn’t strictly required for a build like this, but once you see it, you’re going to have a hard time not wanting to include it on your own panel. He also went through the expense of having the panel and case professionally laser cut and etched, which definitely gives it a polished feel.

We’ve covered quite a number of custom KSP controllers here at Hackaday. The overlap between KSP players and hackers seems unusually high, but of course a game that lets you build and fly contraptions of your own design does sound like something that would be right up our alley.