Building the Control Panel from SAND: Raiders of Sophie
>I may not have a brain, gentleman, but I have an idea.
I wanted to bring the mechanical control panel from SAND: Raiders of Sophie into the real world—complete with a steering wheel, speed throttle, and turn-about handle. I have zero experience with soldering or 3D modeling, but I have a plan to make it work using simple components and modern software.
Here is how I am bringing this panel to life step-by-step:
No-Solder Microcontroller: I am currently testing with an ESP32 (using simple jumper wires, no soldering), but I plan to switch to an RP2040 board for native USB HID plug-and-play support.
Analog Controls: Rotary potentiometers act as the physical lever. Turning a dial changes the signal sent to the board to control steering and speed.
Game Assets & 3D Modeling in Blender: I imported the low-polygon game assets into Blender, downloaded a potentiometer casing/knob, desk clamp models and used AI chat guidance to make simple cuts and joints to fit everything together.
AI for the Code: Rather than learning MicroPython (or C++) from scratch, I used AI to write a two-part script setup. The MicroPython script on the ESP32 tracks the physical 300° potentiometer sweep across five discrete angle zones, while a lightweight PC Python background script receives the USB serial triggers and converts positional changes into clean A and D keypresses in Windows.
Next up on the workbench: speed control. ⚙️
Many thanks to "Lion" for printing.
Слава Україні!