I have had quite the journey in creating my dream Simpit... but I believe my journey is not over. I started back in early 2000 with Jane's Apache and since then, I have had all the Jane's titles, Enemy Engaged titles, and more recently, many DCS titles as well. The problem with sims is that they take a lot of time to master, of which I don't have much of anymore! So, I decided to build myself a Simpit that doesn't follow any real aircraft so I can use it with anything I want.
On the hardware side, I used many, many controllers in my search for my best peripherals, from MS Sidewinder stick to a TM Cougar and Warthog, TM T.16000m. I now use dual VKB Gladiator NXT's, coupled to a TM T.Flight rudder pedals, a TM Cougar MFD, and DIY buttons boxes (4 in total), a spot for an old cell phone I use as a timer while mining quantanium. I also included a second small monitor to be eventually used as a screen to relate ship information once the tech in Star Citizen will allow it. I use a TrackIR as well with the TrackClip installed on my Razer Nari wireless headset.
Of all the peripherals I have used, my VKB's are the ones I prefer the most, by a big margin! They are so smooth, precise and comfortable. They have so many buttons that I still have some unassigned buttons. Why did I make buttons boxes I hear you say? Simply because it's easier to remember where that "Landing Gear" or "Door Open All" buttons are. I use a lot of muscle memory to remember where my commands are and with my stick, it's not so user friendly as I keep forgetting where my functions are!
I am using dual sticks as this allows me to have 6-degrees of freedom (6DOF). What it does is basically allow you to move (throttle) in space using all available axis (up, down, front, rear, left, right).
One thing I did add to my left stick, is a part I printed to transform the stick so it moved sideways, effectively transforming it to an Omni-Throttle (as it is called now by VKB) but before it was available to purchase from VKB.
My button boxes were designed in Sketchup and printed on my Ender-3 3D printer. I have used a variety of switches and buttons from ebay, amazon, etc. and Zero-delay USB board for controlling them. The switches are all momentary on-off-on or momentary on-off switches. I realized that latching switches don't work well for this application.
Now the big questions, how many functions do I have at my finger tips? 124! Yep... and no, they are not all programmed unfortunately!
Star Citizen does not support more than 4 peripherals (+ a keyboard and a mouse) at the same time so with my 8 peripherals, I had to find a way to make it all work. Here comes Joystick Gremlin (JG) to the rescue! I have linked below the videos that have helped me in setting this up.
Initial Joystick Gremlin set up guide by RedLir Live:
The next video from xl0p pertains to Star Citizen specifically:
I can now say that this has been a life saver for me as I was having all kind of issues with SC and the way Win10 handles peripherals but, JG fixed all these and is super easy to set up and use once the initial programming is done.
Below are some pictures of my current set up.
The pictures below are from my older
It's not perfect or finished yet, but I can say that this is the best setup I've had so far and I'm super happy with the results!
Thank you for looking this up and see you in the verse!