I am super inspired by the birth of Spacewar!’s control boxes and want to make something about the controller. Mr. Graetz mentioned they had thought of using a joystick but it was not available yet – this could be a starting point for me. One idea is to build out a mini control panel that resembles the cockpit of an alien space ship or, even better, like those custom controllers built for the Kerbal Space Program game, especially ones with unique joysticks and a big phat panic button.
Few more ideas in mind, I want to turn the rotation SPDT switch into an analog joystick, and split the other SPDT switch into individual sensors. I am thinking the thrust should be just like the thrust lever on a flight controller and a panic button for the hyperspace. This way, I can enjoy speeding up and not worry about mistakenly go into hyperspace.
Rotation Analog Control:
The first question in my mind was how to make a joystick bounce back to the center position by itself after use. I studied an arcade joystick from a past project and a few DIY joystick projects on Thingiverse, especially Jake Wilkinson’s RealRobots Modular Joystick. The spring clamp on the side of an axis rotor did the magic for me. Since I don’t have any metal springs with me, I used a rubber band instead.
