The Concept
SimVimCockpit is an excellent X-Plane hardware cockpit, based around a master Mega Arduino, and many switches, buttons, LEDs, encoders, 7-segment and LCD displays. The developer Vlad and his son have produced a simple Configurator to map Arduino pins to X-Plane parameters e.g. "GearUp" to a switch on pin 7. The Configurator creates a data.cfg file which you copy to the SimVim plugin. When X-Plane runs the hardware input control the plane and hardware outputs show the plane status. I have created a simple generic panel for Cessna and Zibo 737, from a cheap aluminium kick-plate cut to 150mm wide by 265mm: The Generic SimVim panel