Driving Game Pedals and 6 Speed Gear Stick - Made from scrap

Pedals and gear sticks for computer games are quite expensive, so I made my own out of some scrap wood offcuts, rubber bands, string, an old screwdriver, a Teensy 3 micro-controller and potentiometers.

They work with any game that supports a normal USB joystick by using the Teensy 3 in joystick mode.

Driving Pedals

6 Speed Gear Stick

The Teensy 3 is very good for this project as it takes care of all the USB communication and provides a simple API to send the data.

The devices I built do have a number of short-comings: the peddles pivot on the potentiometers which are weak, the gear stick is sometimes unreliable at shifting if it doesn't make contact.

The upside is that it only cost the price of the Teensy (£21) and three potentiometers (£1.50). Rather than £150 for a commercial set.

If making your own set, when programming the micro-controller, you can compensate for some of the unreliability of the hardware in software. The pedals gave a much smoother response when I added took a five point moving average of the samples. The gear stick is de-bounced in software using the Arduino Bounce library.

Euro Truck Simulator 2 - Prototype Real Dashboard

The game Euro Truck Simulator 2 (ETS2) has a telemetry API to allow plugins access to the data about the in-game vehicle. I've created a plugin to send the data down a serial port to an Arduino microprocessor, which then controls the servos, LEDs and an LCD screen.

 This initial prototype is made from cardboard, with the components just pushed through from the back.

This is the back of the dashboard, showing the Arduino board (blue) connected to the other components.

Video of it working is here:

Update:
You can download a copy of the plugin source and a pre-built plugin here:
http://downloads.silasparker.co.uk/dashboard_plugin_2.zip
http://downloads.silasparker.co.uk/ets2_dashboard_v3.zip (New version of code)
The code is now up on Github here: https://github.com/skyhisi/ets2_dashboard

Photo of final device made from MDF, the paint finish is terrible in bright light !

Update:
Video of how it works it here:

Update:
Fixed plugin built in wrong mode. Note, you may also need to install the Visual Studio 2010 Re-distributable package from here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=26999