Hardware Controller Thread

Raketenmann

New Member
Nov 14, 2025
7
11
Embedded Software Dev here...

Any people here who consider trying to attach hardware controllers like joystick or displays or similar to KSA? People who worked on Simpit or KRPC in KSP?
If yes raise your hand would be nice to join our efforts to do some initial testing.

I had quite good experience to create wireless controls for KSP using KRPC and MQTT with RaspberryPI Pico. These controllers I am using in my classes. I would love to do a proof of concept to hook it up for KSA but would need some guidance or somebody to do some pair programming.

Happy to extend this project for it...
https://gitlab.com/attila.strba/kspico
 
The potential with the multi-window is going to be very interesting for controllers. Having a whole display panel for the UI or a handful of little ones somehow? Sounds awesome.

Adafruit and Digikey please stock your finest toggle switches asap.
 
The potential with the multi-window is going to be very interesting for controllers. Having a whole display panel for the UI or a handful of little ones somehow? Sounds awesome.
Exactly this is especially the feature I am looking for. And if there will be a possibility to access those display remotely like connect a wireless monitor or through a Rustdesk showing just a second display that is a real game changer.
I also hope will be the possibility to show map view separate from the main rocket.
 
Question to all the "hardware" developers:

How do you interface the inputs?

Would it make sense to make a mod directly mqtt compatible? Maybe this would make it a bit to complicated for "standalone" input systems...
 
First milestone reached! I was able to control the throttle from the "outside"! I will think how to structure the whole mod and see if I find some spare time soon.
 
I was just looking into kspico and I think for the beginning I could implement an ugly network communication and patch the server of kspico accordingly. Later I will look for a more elegant solution.
 
Question to all the "hardware" developers:

How do you interface the inputs?

Would it make sense to make a mod directly mqtt compatible? Maybe this would make it a bit to complicated for "standalone" input systems...
arduino. especially ones with native usb (anything with an atmega32u4, and others). you can send mouse, keyboard, and joystick events. would also be nice if the game had a serial console for two way communication for things like illumination, screens, and providing control feedback. this should also work with usb-cdc serial and bluetooth (which also supports hid interfaces). that should cover most simpit builder needs. network interfaces (eg udp) would also be nice, though would probibly need to be disabled by default for obvious reasons.

should also cover other dev boards outside of arduino. like eps8266/32, stm32, etc. though for maximum compatibility i think everything should be accessible over an ingame console, which can be connected through a serial or network interface. maybe have virtual controls over console for platforms that do not support hid interfaces, though that can also be done with other means (virtual controller drivers for example, eg vjoy).
 
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After some experimenting it converges to a (primitive) rest api for the most common parameters. Hopefully, I can share a first implementation in the (European) evening including a small python client.