FTL Controller
Over the summer I wired up one toggle switch and made it jump my ship in Eve Online. Now my friend Nick Metzler and I have created the scaled up version of that prototype, a controller for game FTL: Faster Than Light.

I would like to push this controller a bit further before moving on to my next project. If nothing else I would like to put solder together a more permanent circuit board instead of the two breadboards I have now. There are also a few buttons that were finicky. Lastly this controller while great for showing people a few minutes of FTL starts to not work as well later into the game. This version is missing controls for Drones and the switches for teleporting and cloaking currently aren’t coded in.
The set of momentary switches on the left control the in game subsystems of the ship such as oxygen and shields.

the LED toggle switches on the right control the weapons in game. I didn’t wire up the final switch the first time we set up the controller so we just covered it with some duct tape.

The controller was driven by an arduino Leonardo and three 74hc165n shift registers.

it was quite a mess once it was all wired up.

Here is the board as i laid it out in Fritzing. The chips here say something else, they are actually 74hc165n’s.

The arduino code is a modified version of something I found online, as you can see all the switches are doing is pressing the shortcut key for FTL. You can find it on the Github Here
Here is the controller being put together.

And here is Nick and I around 2 in the morning still working on the controller.

thanks for reading!