Hi guys/galls, I wanted to make this post for everyone that wants to start creating their own hardware but doesn’t know how to start. When I started this journey the information available seemed very scattered and sometimes explained like everybody was an electrical engineer. Another motivator was the quality and price of storebought hardware. Nothing beats recreating Saiteks hardware for a tenth of the price with better components.
For these people, I’ve created a website containing some resources for those that want to learn how to create their own hardware. It uses my own software + Arduino library but the basics can be applied to software like Mobiflight as well. Where Mobiflight is more of a contained, friendly, and most of all easy to use ecosystem. My aim is to create a library that works with any board but leaves the programming mostly up to you (on the Arduino side, even though the software is open source and anyone can contribute). Want to send a command to your toaster? Go for it!
It has been an amazing tool that helped me expand my coding knowledge. Coding can be complicated, it covers many topics and can leave you frustrated from time to time. Learning by creating things that you actually use has helped me immensely.
Besides the software, there is a heap of components available on the market. I can remember my own disappointment when I realized that my potentiometer couldn’t rotate endlessly like a rotary encoder.
I want to eventually bundle every component I can collect into separate guides like these:
https://www.bitsanddroids.com/back-to-basics-program-a-button-for-the-flight-sim-connector/
https://www.bitsanddroids.com/back-to-basics-rotary-encoders-in-mfs2020/
I’ve also got fully-fledged project tutorials available like these:
https://www.bitsanddroids.com/radio-with-a-max7219-8-digit-7-segment-display/
I hope I can help at least somebody. If you got some resources as well I’d love to hear about them.