Captain_Hair

Hah yeah, in every single other project I've done the quality has suffered near the end in a dash to get it finished. That's another good reason for the prototype I guess, I don't think I need any parts back from it once it's done so I can play freely whilst building the bigger version.

Apologies for double post, but I've got a small update with my prototype. Finally some of the fixings arrived, so I've fitted the button boards, lcds and analog sticks. Considering I didn't even have any of the components in hand when I designed and printed the panel template everything fits surprisingly well! Worst offender is the analog sticks, which by design have basically no extra space for clearance on either the stick or its mounting holes, so I'm going to have to do a loft of careful filing and sanding of the wood for them to fit correctly without rubbing on anything. I also noticed the throttle panel is much bigger than needed so I might see if I can budge it over to one side and fit something else, maybe more buttons, in that space. I'm also not sure what to do with the Annunciator panel, so I'll consider putting something else in its place, perhaps more buttons. Also the mounting bolts are a little large and certainly aren't aligned in any way, but I'm with with the prototype being a little messy. This is most noticeable on the save/load label which has ended up with a bolt head stuck right in the middle of it. One nice feature is that I can easily set the height of the button boards. So I've got the EVA buttons raised as much as possible for ease of mashing, with the time/space buttons almost flush to prevent accidental pressing. Quick pic of the rear of the board, not particularly interesting as nothing is connected. And the in - progress shift register board. Given that I had space on the board and more shift registers and resistors on the way I figured out I might as well solder it up with 4 sockets rather than 3. That way I've got 8 extra spots for buttons if I need them for anything. And a sneak peek of the big board I'll be using on the final project. 15 shift registers for a total of 120 buttons. The idea being to make adding a new physical button as simple as possible. All I need to do is hook the "new" button upto the common 5v rail on one side and the other runs to this shift register board. So not the most exciting update, but still slow and steady progress. And of course it's all good experience for building the mk2 version later. I could really do with spending and afternoon getting it all connected again and having a test flight.

Cheers for adding mine to the table And for in general keeping track of them with said table, it's been a very handy resource to have them all in one place.

Very nice! I think you've got a great end product there. Nice and simple, plug and play, uses default keys so no configuring, looks cool and all in a neat and tidy with a nice form factor. I like it. Well done on completing it and good luck with your future progress with arduino stuff. Arduino coding really isn't as daunting as it first seems. My advice would be to just start simple, try out alot of the simpler examples to get experience under your belt. Use other people's code/examples and tweak it to suit your own needs. I'd reccomend, if you do go the arduino route, of picking up a "32u4" board. 32u4 is the name of the chip on arduino Leonardo and Pro Micro boards, this chip includes native usb HID built into it, so all you have to do is "keyboard.press X" in the code for keyboard buttons.

Oh well then it bodes well for me if you're using a modified version of his code, my screen is twice the pixels of his, but there's ways and means around fps issues. And I've always got the option to throw in a beefier board like you have with the teensy for more fps at a later date. Thinking ahead (waaaay ahead) if I can't get other navball markers to show on it, I might also consider a physical navball, though those are their own can of worms from what I've seen in other people's projects :p Regarding kerbal simpit, my problem is i dont know where in the documentation "LF_MESSAGE" and other messages are for me to call them. The ones I've been using were found from examples and other people's code. I'm sure there's a list somewhere, just that I haven't found it yet.

Oh wow thanks for replying stibbons My goal was for something like this: https://youtu.be/haSRLkled_A Gah, pasting that link erased the rest of my post... so, yeah my goal was something similar to that link above. I'm willing to compromise where required, I'd be happy with even a handful of frames per second, just something to get me going without the UI As far as Simpit goes, I'm still getting a hang of it, mostly been spending time on parsing the information once I've got it, into nicely displaying it on the lcd. I'm also aware there's features it has that I haven't fully uncovered. As an example I know you can subscribe to resource information, but not sure on the specific code to call a specific resource type, though the wiki documentation says it's possible.

Thanks very much for your reply I think I recall seeing your project, with the wooden dowels. I REALLY like your idea of aircraft flight mode, thats an excellent idea. After some thinking, I'm considering having 1 fully analog joystick and 1 fully digital, with some way of selecting a mode. Perhaps a rotary encoder for each to toggle EVA/Rotation/Translation/Flight/Rover, each mode could then have slightly different controls and allow me to use whichever I want for the task at hand. I'm definaltly going to have a "Flight" mode though. I also like how you've got an autopilot, thats something I'd like to dabble with but I'm leaving that till much later. I was going to go with a button matrix, even ordered 200 diodes to make a large 128 button matrix, but decided against it. Since space inside the panel isn't an issue, I can afford to fit as many shift registers as I want. So rather than (as an examlple) 2 shift registers in a row/column matrix (8 input, 8 output) for a total of 64 buttons, I could just have a large cascade of 8 shift registers in a row to get 64 buttons. Disadvantages are requires more physical space and being slighly inefficient. Advantages are simpler coding and hardware (no diodes or row/column polling needed) and each button will have a common wire so I can more easily use things like rotary encoders and toggle switches that are single pole. Its almost literally a "6 and two 3s" decision, but in my case it should work out less effort this way. I think I've seen @stibbons navball, he mentioned it worked with an arduino but was slow, however his was a much bigger LCD if I recall, so my hope is that by driving fewer pixels It''ll be a bit quicker. To be honest I'd be happy with a very low-quality navball for now so I can do away with the screen GUI, then upgrade to a more powerful navball later if/when I have a finished panel to put it in. The pro micro and lcd only cost £5 combined so if I can get any navball working out of it, it'll be worth the cost. Either way, navball is low on my priorities for now, I just figured Id have a dabble with it I'm currently using Kerbalsimpit and finding it excellent, just a little sparse on features currently. But assuming stibbons picks up on it again after moving I'll stick with it as it is really nice to use. Since I'm mostly separating my inputs and outputs over 2 arduinos, I'm going to work on inputs first then see what stage the various plugins are at when I come to outputs. I've been holding off posting an update till I had more, was hoping to have all the hardware fitted but not had time to do all the soldering, so here is a small update. Thats the button boards soldered up (though I cant fit them till button covers have turned up grrr) and almost all the mounting holes drilled. Slow but steady progress. Heres my current spaghetti of a breadboard, with 16 buttons over 2 shift registers. Once I've gotten the button boards soldered I''ll hook them up to this working example (along with a 3rd shift register) and check they all work. Then I'll move the shift register over to its own circuitboard and free up the breadboard for more experimenting. Goodies started turning up in the post! Heres 20 shift registers of various types, 200 diodes and 20 assorted transistors. And here are the analog sticks I'll be using for the prototype. I chose these as the total cost was £2, so for the budget prototype they were ideal. Final project will have a proper 3 axis stick and 4 way digital joystick as inputs. 2 LCDs recovered from another project. A nice round analog gauge (along with resistors to convert it from 300v to 5v) and an indicator from a classic mini, which I thought might make for a neat "big alarm warning" type lamp. Left to right: A key-operated locking switch for master control. A 4-way HAT style button, a 2 axis PSP analog stick (thought this might be ideal for camera/mouse) and a 10 position rotary encoder that I plan to use for Custom Action Group activation. Another pro micro (or 32u4 rather) and a tiny 1:1 ratio LCD screen, which will hopefully become my "navball for under £5". And lastly, a whole bunch of ON/OFF/ON toggle switches, 50 5mm LED holders alongside coloured LEDs, and 3 very nice heavy duty covered toggle switches for Stage/Abort/Throttle(?) locking. So the majority of this update is really just photos of parts that won't even be on this prototype... but still. Its coming along and I'm narrowing down my final hardware requirements for the main project, which is exactly what I wanted from the prototype.

Howdy folks I've been working on plans for my own Kerbal Control Panel, but wanted to hold off on posting until I was closer to a working prototype. Prototype goals 1: Cover all of the basics required to complete the final project. Such as learning how shift registers work, getting analog and digital input into the game, along with getting data back out. 2: Stay within the budget of £30 3: Be fun to use and at least equally as functional as using keyboard/mouse. 4: Entire panel must fit A4 paper size. 5: Be capable of getting to the Mun and back with, using only the Console. Haven't quite finished, but it's almost there. I've got the LCDs still to fit, still waiting on button covers and need to do a bunch of soldering and finalise my code. But so far it meets all my design goals. The two LCDs, Analog Guage and (hopefully) Annunciator powered through an Arduino uno (the "output" unit). The buttons and analog inputs are handled by a Pro Micro (32u4) to take advantage of its HID Abilities. The result of this is that all inputs register as a keyboard/joystick over usb, so it's very quick and very simple, ensuring all the important inputs are registered quickly and do not require any 3rd party mods or software. This also allows me to experiment with different mods for the outputs (currently using ksp simpit) without interfering with the control aspect of the panel. I only had 3 shift registers to hand, so my button limit is 24. I've managed to eek out a few more though due to the he same keypress having multiple functions, such as on the EVA panel where many of the EVA buttons are also connected to another button elsewhere as they share the same keypress. Analogs each get their own input too, since the analog demux chips haven't arrived yet. I should be updating this weekly, though obviously some updates will be more exciting than others. Things on my to do list, if anyone has any suggestions here I'd greatly appreciate it 1: I have a 128 x 128 pixel LCD that I'd like to getting running as my navball over SPI. I've seen a few people post these, so if anyone could point me toward some code I'd be much obliged! I don't mind if it's not pretty and doesn't have all the Nav markers, I'd just like to be able to get a rough guide to the direction I'm pointing. 2: Decide if I want full analog inputs for control and rotation. I feel like analog input for X/Y rotation is a must, but what about Z? Is it worth going analog on that too, they're not used as often. Similarly I can't decide if I want the Translation x/y/z to be digital or analog, both have their merits. 3: Figure out which mod to use to get data from the game. I'm currently using Kerbal Simpit which, while a little fresh and lacking in features, provides a lot of data very quickly and easily. I've also heard good things about KRPC. And finally just wanted to say thanks to all of those who are also posting their builds as it's helped me a great deal