lots of progress (and mess..) made today:

soldered the components onto the analog board:

and soldered the connections on the analog board:

then i also prepared the pots as well:

and to celebrate the progress and to confirm i'm not a moron i wrote a draft program for the arduino and played a (very) brief round of flight sim with something that looks like this:

tomorrow i'm gonna sort out propper mounting for the joysticks, mount the pots, and figure out the mux for the 32 buttons.