Issue 19 HackSpace Magazine: Control games with a steering wheel featuring the @Adafruit #CircuitPlaygroundExpress #CircuitPython @HackSpaceMag @ben_everard

In Issue 19 Hackspace Magazine, Ben Everard uses an Adafruit Circuit Playground Express to control games with steering wheel movements.

Many microcontrollers, including the Adafruit Circuit Playground Express, can emulate a class of USB peripherals known as human input devices (HIDs). These are the things that you use to control your computer – mostly mice and keyboards, but also trackballs and other controllers.

Your operating system should already have drivers to handle this input, so we can send data to our computer without needing to do any programming on the computer side. What’s more, this can control any game we like – there’s no need to modify the game in any way in order to control it with our microcontroller.

The article shows how to use CircuitPython, the easy to use Python for microcontrollers, to take acceleration values from the onboard Circuit Playground Express accelerometer chip and turn those into keystrokes over USB that any computer can use to control your favorite games.

See the full write-up in Issue 18 of HackSpace Magazine (PDF pages 86 to 87).

Let us know what you are building with Circuit Playground Express in the comments below.