HOBFOB - Hutton Orbital Board Full of Buttons - Game Controller

[little grey]

For your interest and comment, @CMDR Vulkarius and myself have made a 32 button board with the intent of using it for elite!

Its an idea which has been toying with for many moons, but alas, i jumped into being this year and greatly accelerated when Vulkarius took on the software challenge.

This picture is V1 unit which is powered by ether a teensy 4.0 OR a Raspberry Pi Pico. The advantage of the Pico being its incredibly low price. The buttons are setup in a Matrix for the pico with diodes to allow multipule button presses at a time.

Vulkarius would need to speak into the software some more, but programed directly into C and poles each part of the button matrix and observes the responce, does maths and works out which button that represents.

Future plans are to create a layout that sits along the bottom of a keyboard and create a 'display layer' which would contain button discriptions.
We might also work towards making things open-source at a point we are ready to share the files with the world

so, what would you use 32 buttons in sets of 4 for?

FOR THE MUG!!

https://imgur.com/hykyMcz

https://imgur.com/hykyMcz

 

[STRONTIUM DOG]

nowt personally I use voice control but to each there own...……………………

 

[little grey]

nowt personally I use voice control but to each there own...……………………

I love thhe idea of voice, and know a good few who use it.
but for me, buttons and tactile always win out. want to feel like i am doing somthing.
plus, where my PC is setup isnt always the quietest place, It'd suck to go along and Voice attack think i said drop all cargo xD

 

[CMDR Vulkarius]

31 of them are jettison all cargo, last one is landing gear of course

The firmware is fairly simple - it took about an hour from scratch to get buttons working and info showing on my laptop via serial cable, did that during ECM back in August.
Turning it into a USB controller was more fiddly, I think I had that working on the weekend after.
The production package is now an install script to write the firmware + some metadata at the back of its flash memory (these things need serial numbers for USB).

32 buttons are detected by GPIO strobes in a 8x4 grid, 32 being the maximum for DirectInput (still looking into showing as multiple USB devices).
In theory we could get 36 with a 6x6 grid and smuggle that through as a hat switch (actually working in a dev build).
Leaving it at 32 for now though, it's better that it has a fixed 1st version of firmware which works while overlays and layouts are in flux.

Open source isn't a problem but would need some cleaning up and proper presentation.
I'll get around to that sooner if CMDRs are making all sorts of other stuff and there's a huge demand for a working Pico/RP2040 example to make a USB controller!

 

[Northpin]

so, what would you use 32 buttons in sets of 4 for?

defensive binds: heatsink, chaff, scb, ecm
slf orders: think it could take 2x 4 button sets, but the main one would be: defend, attack my target, follow, dock
ship stuff toggles: landing gear, lights, cargo scoop, hardpoints
ship throttle fixed rates : 0%, 50%, 75%, 100% (or other preferred values)
Pips...

And i bet there could be some more

But the question is: who would use it?
I play on kb/m using a 20 buttons mmo mouse - so i have quite a number of binds on the mouse itself, plus some more on the keyboard, centered around WSAD but not only (slf binds are on or around the numpad)
HOTAS users will have most of the binds on the stick and the throttle

 

[little grey]

But the question is: who would use it?
I play on kb/m using a 20 buttons mmo mouse - so i have quite a number of binds on the mouse itself, plus some more on the keyboard, centered around WSAD but not only (slf binds are on or around the numpad)
HOTAS users will have most of the binds on the stick and the throttle

great question, and honestly, i dont know. that said there appear to be lots of button boxes on ebay and alike.
It was mostly a thing i wanted to make, so i did! with a flight sim background i liked the idea of a button pannel i could mount and pull down as an overhead pannel.
but its changed over time. the board would have everything labeled, and most importantly, its going to end up being quite cheap.

TLDR - i wanted to