Need help for my first teensy project

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alex85gt

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Hi all,
I am a new member of the forum, in which I hope to find some help for a complete newby like me.
First of all, sorry for my poor english, I am an italian guy :)
So, I am into simracing from a long time, and I recently moved to the "open" side of the hobby, since I bought a direct drive steering wheel system and I moved to pc instead of consolle.
Time ago, a friend of mine helped me converting a steering wheel to be used on the dd wheelbase, and he used a teensy board to do that.
Long story short, some time after I needed to re-do the conversion and unplug the teensy board from the mainboard of the wheel.
Now I have this spare teensy board and I was thinking to use that to make something useful for simracing, like a button box or maybe some led indicators for rpm or race flags.
Problem is, I do not have any knowledge to do something like that, I can't solder, I can't program anything, so I really don't know where to start.
I would like to accomplish something really easy with this teensy, because intead that will remain closed into a box forever doing nothing.
If someone would be so kind to tell me how to start with this project, that would be great.
(I am also open to hear "you'd better leave the idea right before the start if you don't have any idea at all about that)
Thanks.
 
Don't worry about soldering and stuff for start. Get an a start package with bread board, cables and basic components and try to follow some of the tutorials. There are a lot of the around the internet but a start package probably also has some examples that you can study. There is no way around that part, if you want to do stuff you need to learn it.
 
The basic steps are:
Install with instructions here
https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_download.html

Have a look at
https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_keyboard.html
and
https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_joystick.html
Which talks about the two ways to make a button box talk to the game, the method you use will depend on your game and how you already control it (do you have unused keys, or a game that supports multiple joysticks)

Then you look at
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-arduino-lesson-6-digital-inputs
And work out how you want to make the hardware work. You basically want a button, and some means to connect it to the teensy. You can use aligator clips and bread boards but they have a bad habit of coming loose in a game controller (ask me how I know!) so some form of soldering will need to happen eventually. To start with a bare Teensy and a loop of wire or even a paperclip works for testing (you short a pin to ground to 'press the button').

End state for stage one is one button, connected to the teensy that pretends to be a keyboard or a joystick using code pretty much copied straight from the above links and seeing your game respond to that. From there it is the slipper slope of building bigger and better sim projects.
 
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