Recently, a group of friends and I discovered Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator, a 4-6 person PC game that lets you command and run a starship while working through missions. It’s a game made for Star Trek fans with realistic gameplay and a great plot. In terms of equipment needed, it has fairly low requirements: one computer for each crewmember (networked) and one “server” to run the main screen and keep all the other computers in sync with the game. It’s a really engaging game and each gameplay session lasts for hours. As this is a simulator, I have been working on several projects to make the gameplay more immersive.

One of those is making a physical “red alert” button, which when pressed triggers the red alert in the game causing all of the lighting to switch to a pulsing red and a klaxon to sound. For the button, I used a large “emergency stop” button that fit into a standard one gang outlet box. Due to size constraints, I used an Arduino Nano as it wanted everything to fit inside the outlet box with just a USB cable coming out. This made a little tricky to interface with Artemis because the game only accepts keyboard/mouse input (no API) and the Arduino Nano cannot directly send keypresses to a computer.

I came up with a quick workaround, sending serial data from the Arduino to a C# console application which would use Microsoft’s InputSimulator library to send the keypresses. It’s not as elegant a system as I originally hoped for, since it requires client software but it works well and adds more to the experience. If you want to build your own button, I’ve provided instructions and software on GitHub.

Final Product

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