Using an Arduino 32u4 as a Visual Pinball controller

I'm building a Visual Pinball cabinet, and I'm planning to use an Arduino Compatible board (a Pololu A-Star 32U4 Micro) as a controller. The Arduino will appear as a USB keyboard, joystick and Media remote to convert button pushes to keyboard presses, plunger position to joystick movements, and volume knob rotations to volume controls on the PC.

I may later try to use the Arduino as an output device as well, to control a lit button, and some solenoids.

I've found the following sites with information:

• Keyboard: The Arduino Mouse and Keyboard libraries
• Joystick: This blog entry (with code)
• Arduino Leonardo Remote Control (Multimedia Keys) Support for Arduino 1.0.5

So, all information seems to be available.

The second two links both require modifying two files (in the Arduino installation. Too bad the software is not flexible enough to support using new USB device types without modifying the distribution.

I forked the Arduino stable (1.0.6) distribution on GitHub here.

I've pushed my untested changes. To be continued.