This Arduino-Powered Controller Brings Star Citizen's Controls Out of the Game and Into Your Hand

Pseudonymous maker "VelOBor," also known as Oleg, has completed an Arduino-powered game controller build designed to make the still-in-alpha Star Citizen game more immersive — by breaking out the functions of its in-game mining mode.

"At first I just had a switch panel for consumables and mining mode," Oleg explains of the project. "Eventually I came to this: Laser power on a slider (used one of the levers on my warthog throttle for this before and it’s the best way for this), consumables, turret relative/absolute mode, turret gyro, scanning mode."

"These are the main ones. Added a few more because I had space leftover on the controller. Completely configurable, because it’s running the joystick library and the computer sees it as a basic two axis joystick with a dozen buttons."

The control panel is powered by an Arduino Pro Micro microcontroller development board, which uses a common library to appear as USB joystick to the host operating system. The hardware is housed in a chassis originally designed as a remote control for a crane, which Oleg modelled to create a 3D-printable version.

"[The] code is written in VSCode [with] PlatformIO," Oleg explains. "The entire project is done in open source (or otherwise free for non-profit) software and hardware."

The controller schematic, 3D STL, and firmware are available on GitHub under an unspecified open-source license, with more information available in Oleg's Reddit thread.