Probably a dumb question from a newB

[JustJ]

I stumbled across this site and was amazed at the things they offer. The gears immediately started spinning at peak RPM. I'm wanting to make what now seems simple button box for my sim racing cockpit. Maybe 6 momentary buttons, a couple of toggles and a potentiometer to adjust brake bias connected to a PC via USB (maybe something that Windows has a generic driver for?). The program I use is really compatible with just about anything and allows mapping. What is the simplest most cost effective way to to it? I have a couple 3d printers to make a box. I was going to try learning the Arduino (Im absolutely going to now) but that seems like massive overkill seeing just a small sample of what's capable with them.

[andrew]

I'm wanting to make what now seems simple button box for my sim racing cockpit. Maybe 6 momentary buttons, a couple of toggles and a potentiometer..

. I was going to try learning the Arduino (Im absolutely going to now) but that seems like massive overkill seeing just a small sample of what's capable with them.

If you're interested in getting into Arduino and don’t mind a bit of DIY then that would absolutely be the way to go. This is exactly the sort of thing the simpler development boards are intended for. In particular I would recommend looking at the Leonardo or its cut-down counterpart the Pro Micro. Both these boards are capable of emulating an HID such as a keyboard or a mouse.

So you can probably already see that with one of those boards it would be a case of reading in your switches or potentiometer via its IO pins and then passing the information to your PC as key presses or mouse movements. The hard part of course would be creating the software (called sketches) but the Arduino IDE (the software you use to write the programs and upload them to the development board) has lots of examples built-in including ones that show you how to emulate a keyboard & mouse. And of course you will by no means be the first person to do this using an Arduino. So I'm sure there are lots of examples and tutorials out there for doing exactly what you want to do. YouTube is always a good resource to learn the basics.