Constructing a customized broom controller for Hogwarts Legacy

For followers of Harry Potter, Hogwarts Legacy is a dream sport. It drops you into the Potterverse the place you’ll be able to grow to be a wizard, casting spells and driving brooms to your coronary heart’s content material. It’s a very immersive sport, however you lose a few of that immersion while you understand you’re really simply pushing buttons on a gamepad. That’s why YouTuber ‘That’s So Mo’ constructed a customized Hogwarts Legacy controller on a reproduction Nimbus 2000 broom.

The broom itself is the property of Mo’s pal. It’s a very costly prop duplicate that appears identical to the Nimbus 2000 from the movies. Mo couldn’t danger any harm to that, so he hooked up all the elements to a block of packing foam that may slide on and off the broom deal with. These elements embrace an Arduino, an accelerometer, and an ultrasonic distance sensor.

Because of its onboard ATmega32U4 microcontroller, the Arduino is configurable to seem as a USB HID gamepad when related to a PC. The button presses it sends depend upon the orientation of the broom stick and the place of the rider’s physique. The accelerometer displays orientation whereas the ultrasonic sensor checks the space to the rider’s torso. So if the rider tucks in near the Nimbus 2000, the in-game avatar will pace up. If the rider leans proper, the avatar will flip proper.

With this controller, Mo can play like he’s actually driving a brush — at the very least for so long as his pal lets him borrow the Nimbus 2000!