Having a game-tailored controller is a level-up in more ways than one, letting you perform in-game actions quickly and intuitively, instead of trying to map your actions to a clunky combination of keyboard and mouse movements. [abzman] took the Pelco KBD300A, a DVR-intended camera controller panel with a joystick, reverse-engineered it, and then rebuilt it into a Kerbal Space Program controller. What’s more, he documented every detail along the way!
The write-up is so extensive, it’s four separate posts — all of them worth reading without a doubt. In the first post, he describes the original hardware, the process of reverse-engineering it, and a few tips for your own RE journeys. Next, he covers about making his own board, showing all the small decisions he’s had to make, with plenty of KiCad screenshots. If you are on the lookout for designing such a board, there’s plenty to learn!
The original hardware didn’t go down without a fight — the third post talks about taming the seven-segment displays, the onboard joystick, and fighting with the key matrix wired in exactly the way you wouldn’t want. In the end, he shows us how you could tie a controller easily into Kerbal Space Program.
One more piece of hardware liberated, one more win for the hacker world. Whether it’s a Macintosh SE, a classic ThinkPad, or even a generic rotary tool, these upgrades are always a joy to see. If you wanted to learn to do such an upgrade yourself, here’s us showing how you can pull this off with a classic Sony Vaio!
Its nice but doesn’t help the fact I never made it past kerbal’s tutorial stage.
The game is a tutorial stage. Failing is fun.
I have an entire duna mission set up to go, relay sat in orbit already, big mother ship , two landers (redundancy) a mining and processing facility to refuel etc.. to scared to launch I delayed then stopped playing for a year . Now I have no idea what im doing anymore and need to play again from the start to build my skills before I send the mission…
It’s like looking at a that C code you wrote in jr high with zero comments..
Using a camera controller as a starting point for these things is somewhat genius…
They usually are built to pretty good mechanical standards, there are tons available surplus and ebay as technology gets obsoleted, and they have enough inputs and controls that it seems like it would be worthwhile to trudge through the amount of work to rebuild it….
I think I need to look into this again.
Really a shame that KSPII got stuck in some kind of budget/development hell. I was really looking forward to that one. Sounds like their investors just got cold feet and rugged them after early access went public, making them all look like crooks. Sad, they didn’t deserve to get treated that way.
I have been playing the most recent update. While far far from finished, the game feels much more of a game now and is fairly fun, instead of a half finished prototype. Still quite buggy and unpolished, so too early to say if it will succeed, but I am more hopeful the game will shape up to something worthwhile.
That’s absolutely not what happened, For Science makes it a far more enjoyable game and gives me a lot of hope for the future .
I’ve been playing that update for a week now and most complaints people had have vanished- I recommend you try it out.
As a good alternative to the custom route, the Farming Simulator controller that Saitek/Logitech makes, when paired with a stick, instead of a wheel. That combo is almost tailored to KSP. I almost went that route before opting for a decade long Apollo inspired build.
I’ll have to come back to the post. I may have a kbd300a laying around somewhere. I actually worked there for 18 years ;) i do have a Pelco KBD5000, much better and easier to reprogram if you get your hands on it. USB devices. I had dual joysticks in it at one time with HID gamepad loaded onto it. but someone flashed it back to normal Pelco code. It would need to be reprogrammed all over again and i dont have that code or schematic anymore. wouldn’t be to difficult to reverse engineer again.
It’s a bit grey and lightless for my taste.
Even the very old appolo-era spacecraft had lots of lights. at least.
It doesn’t have to be all colorful, but some warm white indicators you know – it would be nice.
But to each his own of course.