Artemis Spaceship Bridge Console — BSG LCARS Interface
Contents
Overview
Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator is a cooperative multiplayer game where each player sits at a dedicated station — helm, weapons, engineering, science, and comms — and the crew works together to operate a starship.
The team took this well beyond keyboards and joysticks. Each station has a custom hand-built capacitive touch console — no commercial touchscreens. These UI’s are a full LCARS-style interface, styled after the Battlestar Galactica (2003) aesthetic rather than the Trek TNG look most people associate with LCARS. The Arduino firmware presents the consoles to the host PC as standard USB HID devices — no custom drivers needed.
The Full Experience
Beyond the main bridge, the installation included:
- 4 support craft — independently flyable vessels that crew members could launch and pilot on their own away missions alongside the main ship
- Training room — an onboarding space for new crew members, narrated by Zapp Brannigan, walking them through station roles and procedures before their first mission
- Viewer portals — dedicated display positions for a spectator gallery, so an audience could follow along as the crew journeyed without being in the way of active stations
Hardware
- Arduino with USB HID support (Leonardo or ATmega32U4-based board) per station
- Custom capacitive touch panels — hand-fabricated, no commercial touchscreen hardware
- Multiple logical input axes and buttons per station, mapped to Artemis control inputs
- BSG-themed LCARS layout applied to each station’s physical panel design
How It Works
The firmware enumerates each station as a separate USB HID joystick/gamepad device over a shared USB connection. Button and axis states are read from the capacitive touch hardware and reported to the host as standard HID reports — plug and play with Artemis on any OS.
Members and visitors could experience the full bridge simulator — from training through live missions — during open shop hours.