Buttons, Joystick and Switches

Hello Kerbalnauts,

All of our buttons, switches and our joystick have arrived, and they look great...

Not Everything went perfectly with the buttons and switches thought... the momentary switches are a little fragile, and the spring mechanism can break during operation i.e. we already broke one.

 We are going to try to 3d print the replacement part or produce a much stronger one out of a non-conductive metal.

Now that we have every piece, they must be measured for their dimensions such that we can 3d print the trays they sit in.

Building a Frame

Hello Kerbalnauts,

After agreeing on the look of the concept design, we have gone ahead and cut all the pieces out of plywood and fastened it together.

After cutting the pieces out and starting to fasten them together it became apparent that the back could remain open, providing easy access to the internals and electronics, without weakening the structures integrity to a point where it would feel flimsy.

The final look is pretty well spot on to the original design (minus the back covers and the addition of two end plates, one on each side of the controller). But overall we are very pleased with the look of the main body.

Brains Behind the Controller

Hello Kerbalnauts,

We are pleased to present to you the brains behind the Kerbal Controller... The Arduino microcontroller.

For this project we are using an official Arduino Uno R3 and,

A SainSmart Mega2650 R3 development board(arduino clone).

The plan is to use the two board in conjunction with one another; 1 board will handle all the button presses and switch toggles (inputs) and the other board will handle all the LEDs and LCD displays (outputs).

We are using a program called GNU Octave(open source alternative to MatLab) to open a serial connection to the arduino. This will allow us to communicate with the arduino sending the data to the LCDs and the states to the LEDs. It will also allow us to see what states the buttons/switches are in.

Once we have the state at which a button is in we can then update the data in Kerbal Space program by uploading the data through the Telemachus mod.

Just a Concept

Hello Kerbalnauts,

Here is our Design Concept for the controller.

For some more information on some of the concepts present in the picture please check out our original post on reddit or for general inquiries/comments please leave them as a comment or private message us.

Note: The hole in the center is for a flight joystick to sit.

The Beginning

Hello Kerbalnauts,

This blog has been started to help show the progress of a Kerbal Space Program custom controller. It is also a place where people can ask questions and make suggestions for the current and possible future builds.

We will try and answer every question to the best of our knowledge, and hopefully help you with your future Kerbal builds/missions.

If you have any specific questions on the controller or Kerbal in general, one can private message us and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

We will even help with the calculations and algorithms used for the mission control(see below).

Background:
-Me and my friend are both Mechanical Engineering students.

-He will be handling a majority of the physical building of the box and solid modeling.

-I will be handling alot of the computer coding, optimizing, and electrical work

Goals:
-To have a fully functioning Kerbal Controller which can be used instead of the traditional mouse and keyboard.
-To produce a functioning Mission Control to guide the Kerbalnauts (people controlling the vessel) to their required destination by making tools available to simplify the process of "doing rocket science"
-To make Kerbal Space Program an even more emersive experience and provide a solution to the lack of a multiplayer experience.

Hardware:
-Arduino: world famous open source microcontroller.
-Arduino Clones: a copy of above.

Software:
-GNU Octave/MatLab: to do a majority of the heavy lifting and communicating with the arduino.
-Arduino UI: to upload our custom programing to the arduino.

Mods:
-Telemachus: will be used to send out the data from the kerbal game to a retrievable format.

P.S. At the time of writing this we have already made some progress on the designing and as such multiple posts may appear in a very short amount of time. This is not to be taken as a rate at which work is being completed.