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Flight Simulator Switch Panel for Xbox/PC

For the casual flight simmer, a peripheral device that sits somewhere between arcade and realism. Hopefully this will inspire someone to make something cool!

How it works:

I built this device to work with Microsoft Flight Simulator on the Xbox series S, although I suspect it should work for PC as well.

The main idea here is to use a USB compatible Arduino (or other microcontroller), to emulate a standard old keyboard and thus send instruction to the game via key commands. We can accomplish this using the Arduino Keyboard library. **You MUST use a USB compatible board for this.

We then build a box with a bunch of switches and buttons, write code to listen for the buttons and map them to specific key commands.

For this device I used one USB compatible Arduino Pro Micro as the main board, and 2 additional Arduino Nano boards essentially as I/O expanders. This simply allows for more available pins, but makes the project a bit more complicated.

Assumes experience with Arduinos and Intermediate coding skill.

Supplies
- Arduino/Microcontroller(s) - One of your controllers must be usb compatible in order to make use of the Arduino Keyboard Library. If you are using extra arduinos as slaves to increase the number of available pins, they do not have to USB compatible. You can find a list of compatible boards here: https://www.arduino.cc/reference/en/libraries/keyboard/.
- Enclosure
- Soldering iron, wires, perf board
- Switches and buttons as per your design”

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