While a keyboard and mouse work well for general computing tasks, if you really want to get your button-mashing on, then you need a stick setup with buttons and a joystick. Unfortunately, not all of us have $250 or so sitting around to spend on such a device, so we stick with our keyboards, or perhaps a cheap gamepad, and call it a day. The MixStick PCB 12key Compact USB Arcade Controller PCB, by Ryan Bates of Retro Built Games, allows one to instead build a mash-up between a keyboard and a hundreds-of-dollars arcade setup.
The board has space for 10 keys on the left, and and 10 on the right, plus mounting points for RST/auxiliary buttons, and LED lighting. These two boards can be split for custom ergonomic arrangement and soldered together as needed, and each side features a set of mounting points for fight stick keyboard mounting.
Documentation on the build is available on GitHub, and the video below shows how everything is set up. It’s designed to work with the DaemonBite firmware by MickGyver, running on an ATmega32U4 Pro Micro. Of course, if you’re not into gaming, one could certainly see this/these PCBs repurposed as a custom HID for standard computing, or perhaps it could even be set up as a chording keyboard.
