Handsome Sim Racing Button Box Is A Super Easy Build

Sim racing is a lot more complex than playing Need For Speed 3: Hot Pursuit. You need buttons for all kinds of stuff, from headlights to brake balance to traction control. If you want to control all that in an intuitive and realistic manner, you’ll want to build yourself a decent button pad like [Chris Haye] has done. It’s surprisingly easy, too!

Very cool.

[Chris] is quite a serious racer, and needed four button boxes. He wanted to do this on the cheap, so he 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 off Amazon to populate the black project boxes which acted as the housings.

His final button pad looks straight out of a GT3 race car, but it’s the simplest of the bunch. It’s literally just a USB numpad with a carbon vinyl wrap applied and some home-printed labels. One suspects the feel isn’t particularly high-quality but the look is top tier. If you’re a streamer that wants to build a hardcore-looking setup, this is a great way to go.

[Chris] estimates that each box took maybe an hour to build, tops. It’s a great example of solution-focused design. He could have gotten out his own microcontroller and done a custom PCB and all that, and the results surely would have been good. But it would have taken far longer! It’s hard to beat the speed of wiring together Amazon arcade buttons with the Arcade USB Encoder’s pre-terminated wire harness. If you’re more interested in sim racing than building button boxes, it’s a great way to do a custom pad fast.

Best of all? [Chris] says he managed to put these all together for £60—quite a feat of bargain engineering. We’ve featured some other builds along these lines before, too—even using vintage aircraft controls! Video after the break.