Gamepad Button Question Flight Sim

[attacker5]

Ok, this really is offtopic

I am making a cockpit for flight simulator. Now I have devised quite a couple of possible ways of wiring the switches on the panel to the game. But there is a problem, like most games, the controls are binded to a action in the game Shift+G = gear up. simple. Now my plan was to buy a cheap keyboard, rip the keys off, and wire the + and - terminals of the key to a toggle switch like you would find inside a cockpit of a cessna 172 or something like that. It works, but the problem comes when it is in use. The switch is a normal real life use toggle switch meaning it has a On and an Off, so when it is in the On position the key is constantly pressed and a key repeat occurs. The idea is to simply press the key and let go when the switch is flipped either way. So scratch that idea, it isnt going to work, unless quite a circuit is built, costs too much.

So then I thought, Keyboard emulator, like the ke72 by hagstrom electronics, umm, seems like it would work, it handles toggles just fine and all, but now there is another problem,

the keyboared only has about 54 keys that can be used to assign things too, x 4 for shift, ctrl and shift ctrl functions, so wer at 200 roughly, there are stilll more switches in a cockpit, so, the real question???

Is there any way of creating buttons for the computer to recognize liek a gamepad, for example, when you play mxs with a ps3 controller, when you set the bindings, it says PLAYSTATION 3 Button 4 or whatever, is there any way to make custom ones of these for my problem. If you can help, it will be appreciated, thx.

[wheels1758]

Well, I'm going to go with yes on this one, you can do pretty much anything on a computer with enough know-how. Is it going to be easy, well probably not. The Xbox360 controller can be set up to have separate z-axes, instead of a positive/negative setup, so I'm sure you could write some code to allow the computer to recognize different things.

Now, back to reality, what is the reason you want more buttons than can be produced using a standard keyboard? If you are creating this for flight sim, wouldn't there be enough buttons already? If you want the proper number of switches to emulate a true cockpit, put in dummy switches. No reason to hassle yourself with rigging something that won't be of any use, ya know?

As for the toggle. There is probably a way to disable key holding. I'm not sure if it would register when you turn off the toggle though.

[attacker5]

Thx,

The reason I need more keys is because i still need to use the default keyboard as in text, and in flight sim there are hundreds of buttons, these all represent real things, I also cant make dummy switches because im trying to make it very realistic to actually practice instrumental flight rules and such. Thanks for the info though.