Sim racing is much more complex than gaming Need For Speed 3: Hot Pursuit. You need buttons for everything from headlights to brake balance to traction control. If you want to control all of that in an intuitive and realistic way, you should build yourself a proper button pad like (Chris Haye) did. And it’s surprisingly easy too!
(Chris) is a pretty serious racer and needed four Button boxes. He wanted to do this as cheaply as possible, so decided to build his first three boxes around the Zero Delay Arcade USB Encoder, a cheap controller board available on eBay for around £7. Arcade buttons were sourced from Amazon to populate the black project boxes that served as the enclosures.
Its final keypad looks like it came straight out of a GT3 race car, but it’s the simplest of the bunch. It’s literally just a USB number pad with a carbon vinyl covering and some self-printed labels. You’d suspect it doesn’t feel particularly premium, but the look is top-notch. If you’re a streamer looking to build a hardcore setup, this is a great solution.
(Chris) estimates that each box took an hour or less to build. It’s a great example of solution-driven design. He could have pulled out his own microcontroller and made a custom PCB and all that, and the results would certainly have been good. But it would have taken a lot longer! It’s hard to beat the speed of wiring up Amazon arcade buttons using the Arcade USB Encoder’s pre-made harness. If you’re more into sim racing than building button boxes, this is a great way to quickly build a custom pad.
And the best part? (Chris) says he managed to put it all together for £60 – a real feat of cheap engineering. We’ve featured other builds like this before – even using vintage aircraft controls! Video after the break.
