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!

[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.

A StreamDeck is effectively a really cool box full of colorful buttons that activate various things on your PC. They’re fun and cool but they’re also something you can build yourself if you’re so inclined. [Jason] did just that for his sim racing setup, and he included some nifty old-school tech as well.

An ESP32 is at the core of the build, listening to button presses and communicating with the PC. However, the build doesn’t actually use regular buttons. Instead, it uses infrared sensors wired up in a matrix. This was an intentional choice, because [Jason] wanted the device to be reconfigurable with different paper card overlays. There are ways to do this with regular buttons too, but it works particularly well with the infrared technique. Plus, each button also gets a Neopixel allowing its color to be changed to suit different button maps.

What’s really neat is that the button maps change instantly when a different overlay card is inserted. [Jason] achieved this with an extra row of infrared sensors to detect punched holes in the bottom of the overlay cards.

Once upon a time, even building your own keyboard was an uphill battle. Today, it’s easier than ever to whip up fun and unique interface devices that suit your own exact needs. That’s a good thing! Video after the break.