Button Box/Button Board Recommendations?

Teams that use button boards as part of their driving, what do you use?

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Our team builds our own button board into our driver station console. We have had great success with the A-Pac control boards carried by Ultimarc. We’ve been using an A-Pac for a couple of years and it’s really easy and reliable. It plugs into the laptop by USB, just like a joystick or xBox controller, but then you can plug up to 32 buttons or a combination of buttons and joysticks into it (Ultimarc also sells buttons, so no problem finding those.) The buttons are fully programmable through the interface and can be used to control almost anything (auto actions, manual controls both momentary and sustained, etc.) It’s pretty easy to build a button box frame on one side of your drivers station and then custom drill a top plate to take the button array you need for that season’s robot. Even though our drivers use xBox controllers for driving the robot, our operators prefer the custom button box solution for other operations.

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I highly recommend the Xbox Adaptive Controller: Secondary Joystick

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Does it need external power or can it be powered over USB? It is super cool.

I don’t know about the xBox Adaptive Controller, but the A-Pac is powered by the USB connection, no external power needed. It’s also a pretty small PCB, so it fits easily into a custom button board box. It’s also much more adaptable and very good at changing configurations for each new season’s control needs. Oh, and it’s about half the price of the xBox Adaptive Controller.

The Xbox Adaptive connects to a laptop using a USB-C-to-USB-A cable. It does not require any other power input.

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This is awesome! Thank you!

In the fall I made a series of consoles using Arduino and various inputs and outputs: joysticks, encoders, buttons, audio output, LED indicators, etc, using I2C-connected Sparkfun and Adafruit stuff like Neokeys. The point is to make it easy to include “human factors” in a holistic control engineering program, and to help students start to learn about microcontrollers. Feel free to fork the repo, feedback and pull requests welcome.

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Only downside of this is your limiting your buttons thanks to the amount of ports. Some of the basically single hand keyboards i was looking at would get you to 80 keys

Back in 2019, we made an operator control box out of laser-cut 1/8" MDF, some arcade buttons, some panel-mount toggle switches (and a covered toggle switch because it was awesome for enabling climb), and some LEDs. It was all powered by an Arduino Due so it would show up on the driver station as a standard gamepad. It worked pretty well for us and the most annoying part was wiring everything.

GitHub project
Pictures, video, and more descriptions in this CD post

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do you mean the arduino thing? it’s 32 keys per port, 6 ports, so 192 keys if you really want them.

was talking about the XBOX adaptive controller

I’ve had really good luck with the PoLabs “PoKeys57U”. It’s a totally customizable USB - Joystick interface with loads of I/O options. It’s easy to set up with simple switches (buttons) and potentiometer dials/sliders (axis), and can also have special functions programmed into it, if you feel like getting really advanced.

It has 55 I/O ports overall that all support basic on/off signaling, and most of the ports are also multi-function with compatibility for various interfaces including: PWM, Analog, Fast/Ultra-fast Encoders, Counters, LCD screens, LED Matrix, and more. It also support 3.3v and 5v power output for any LEDs you might want to have on your button box.

At one point you could get them on Amazon, but they appear to not be available there at the moment so not sure what the best source is anymore. Totally worth it if you can get your hands on one though.

that reminds me, one more plug for the arduino thing. no hand wiring. it’s just qwiic cables.

https://www.sparkfun.com/qwiic

There was in the past the TI-LaunchPad and firmware that was supported by FIRST.
I’ve been using the these for the last few years, with good success.

There is post here on CD with a links to the software from last season:

MSPEXP430F5529LP

https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/595-MSPEXP430F5529LP
Has 1000 in stock

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/texas-instruments/MSP-EXP430F5529LP/4311683
Currently out of stock

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One of the things really attractive to me about the XBOX Adapative Controller is the reliability. I’m sure a lot of these others work just fine, but its just nice to know.

Yeah actually my motivation for doing the Arduino thing was my dislike of Launchpad, because it’s a black box with a magic “gamepad” app. There used to be an arduino ide fork but it was abandoned by TI in 2019, and they’ve gone back to their proprietary tools. If you care about open source, you’ll stay away from Launchpad.

It is extremely sturdy. For little boards like arduino, they are quite wimpy on their own, but you can certainly make them sturdy by building a robust enclosure. But with the Xbox Adaptive, you are in great shape to start with.

yeah, not as many buttons as i’d like but we might just get 2 and wire them into the panel

It’s not a black box. Although I could see how one might make the conclusion.

I have the source for the LaunchPad firmware code, it’s on Github.

I have the TI tool kit to compile it, and change it, and load it, should I need or desire.
(They are free from TI)

You also don’t need the GamePad Tool either that used to be provided.
You can load the firmware yourself with the native TI-Loader.

What was provided as part of the FRC Game Tools was a convenience to teams to make it easy to be up and running.