so i'm thinking of designing an aux controller

[PenPlotter]

firstly a bit about me, i design and build products for a living, generally injection mould tooling and machined products, so i do know what i'm doing. what i'm planning to make wont be your every day Jaycar ( think radio shack) box with some switches on it. if it feels cheep i haven't done it right

the plan is to make a controller to help increase the immersion of the cockpit part of the game.

basically its going to be series of switches & buttons, built to the same level if not better than the thrustmaster warthog. but made specifically for star citizen.

it will be for controlling things like
shields, weapons groups, counter measure, eject, self destruct, etc etc. and using toggle switches like this.

you know that flicking one of these to eject would feel sweet.

its all still a work in progress at this stage; who knows what "must have" features sc is going to add.

the main reason i'm thinking about making this is the 3 pages of key bindings is too hard to remember. could be that i'm just getting old...... What am i saying; i am getting old. but with age comes a deeper appreciation for bitter / darker beer!........ be right back.....

Right where was I,
What i guess i'm trying to say is would you guys be interested in this as a finished product.

what sort of things would you want on this.

i don't want to have things like console or chat on it, in my mind its purely for ship controls.

anyway let me know what you think.
pen plotter out.

 

[Teru]

Honestly, I don't know why more makers haven't jumped into this ban wagon. Immersion is going to be a massive deal in this game and additional functionality is always welcome.

Custom making this to specific ship layouts would be next level awesome.

 

[marcsand2]

The problem part will be: the auxiliary controller must fit in the customers setup. I - remounted my office chair on a fixed plate
- fixed the rudder pedals optimal
- fixed the flightstick at right armrest
- fixed the throttle at left armrest
- made another stand for the G13 above my right leg
- placed my tablet with Roccat on desk, together with keyboard and mouse
It will be hard to add some more controls without builing a real cockpit instead of maintaining fixed office chair with a curved office desk.

The only thing holding me back to build a cockpit is measurements and good building plans

 

[marcsand2]

And the biggest problem with my current setup is that it is not very easy to get in or out and it is too comfy, soo I fall asleep in it too often :D

 

[Beerjerker]

I haven't taken the plunge to joystick/throttle yet, but I want to. My main issue is there's just too little room on my desk.
I would be interested to see what you come up with. I love me some toggle switches!

 

[Black Sunder]

Ox controller?

 

[BUTUZ]

Yes we need more clever people to make things like this. I wish I was good with my hands. Don't fall into the trap of making everything with toggle switches because it looks epic, and then realising many functions would be better off with just a big red button. But I am sure you know this!

I'd like a "secondary items" controller for things like Jump Drive / Selection, Third person View, Weapons/Shields/Engines HUD select, etc all done with nice buttons and stuff. mmmmm. Can keep the joystick buttons for really important things - and even though voice attack is awesome, buttons are awesome too!

How hard would it be to take a joystivk like the thrustmaster t16000m, use the motherboard off it - but rewire and rehouse it it so that all the buttons are proper big buttons as above, but then it just easily shows up as a usb joystick. I think that would be cool.

 

[Bruttle]

I spent a good deal of time today thinking about this while I was at work (my mind tends to wander). I love a good product design process. I thought about what would you need to have on this board as the bare necessity. It would need to be emergency items. After all, you have all the time in the world to request a landing. However, you won't have time to fiddle around with trying to find the eject button. Likewise, there are some functions that are very difficult to do on the fly with the current control scheme.

So I imagined something that would fit between my 2 joysticks (or hotas rig). So it would have to be 12-15 inches wide. It would be about 10 inches deep and angled slightly (1 inch in front but ~3 inches in the back). It would have a solid metal housing and rubber feet so it sticks to the desk like a brick. The all-metal housing would also allow for attachable brackets to mount it just about anywhere.

The first thing on my mind was the eject button. I pictured it in the lower left hand corner so I can just smack it with my throttle hand. I imagine it would look something like an emergency stop button at your local gas station, just a big red cap just waiting to be slapped.

Then I got to thinking about shields and power. So far, I haven't been too happy with the controls on that. It's not a big deal right now since they are pretty useless, but eventually it may become important. This is what I spent a decent portion of the day thinking about. You would need something that could track position in 2 dimensions. I entertained quite a few different methods to do this. This included using a slip ring on a rotary position sensor to embed a slide potentiometer into a large knob. This, and a bit of clever programming, could actually work like a 2 dimensional slider. Ultimately though, for both price and ease of use, i ended up at a joystick. You could get a joystick to mount on it called a self locking monolever switch. With that, you could just pick a position for the joystick to be at and it would stay there. So if you slapped it forward, it would stay forward and (if it all worked out) put all your power to the forward shields.

This would probably work for power management, but would likely work best as a bank of sliders. So if you wanted to power down everything, you could just slap them all down and go full silent. You can do all this with that "voice attack" software, but this would be so much cooler. The rest of the controls could just be set up like a virtual keyboard so you could custom bind whatever you wanted to whatever button. You could even use those led backlit clear buttons that you can put you own labels under the button.

Utimately, it would look something like this. It would just be smaller and with a different configuration. and black. Of course, this is just what I would be looking at if I were to build one for myself.

Edit: I would also probably need an arduino board for this too...

 

[PenPlotter]

interesting thoughts @Bruttle,
I've spent the day pondering it too.
this is the direction i'm thinking. except a, not so large and b, not over head. maybe side mounted,
i want it to feel cockpitty,( is that a word? is now).

I feel that we are still going to need a keyboard and mouse so i cant take up the real estate that they use.

"over head" would be so cool, but i know my Mrs would kill me if i made my desk more of an eye sore.

Ejection, id want a guard on it i think, same with self destruct. big red buttons call to me. id push it all the time... and so would by small daughter..
ಠ_ಠ


i like the joystick / shield idea. but RSI have now added top and bottom shields ( since 2.4) not in game but on the controls sheet. just to make design a little bit trickier. ill wait to see what they do with them.

other things would be things like;
Cycle counter measures / fire counter measures ( hope i have the ability to split these currently they are toggle and long hold respectively)

powers, an interesting one. in the control's they have gradients but they also have (power state 1,2,3,4 and reset toggles) so having preset power states assigned to switches might work. don't think its in game yet. could be wrong.

if i use sliders id want to use these sliders, but then everything starts to get bigger and more expensive. plus then we start getting into the world of complicated software. Might save that for a later build. would be cool though if they moved them selves.

anyway.

ill see where i get with this over the weekend. might have something worth looking at.

 

[Bruttle]

i like the joystick / shield idea. but RSI have now added top and bottom shields ( since 2.4) not in game but on the controls sheet. just to make design a little bit trickier. ill wait to see what they do with them.

That actually makes things easier after a fashion. It removes the need for a dual position slider work around since a 3d slider is... silly. I like where your head is at though with the motorized sliders and the solution may lie there.

I would put in a 6 pack of those sliders and program them to move in relation to the others with a arduino or pi. Then label one per shield direction (top, bottom, left, right, fore, aft). So when you push up the front shield slider, the others would move down to indicate the drop in shield levels for the other directions. This would also allow for simultaneous increases like top left or rear right. I would imagine you would also need a button placed next to it though to zero them all out.

Nice find on the motorized sliders though. At $30 each, the price is definitely right.

 

[PenPlotter]

ok im back, funny how time flys when you have a new baby.
time to get back on with designing this thing

ive been thinking would it be better to make a set of plates for each system like this

or

have a box that you could mount under your desk on rails?
like this?

what do you think?