Simple update from my work last night to get a the switches up and running. I harvested the switches from the io board of a printer I recently disassembled, wired up the board, tested getting a read from the board.

From there via the serial monitor I was able to see the buttons were reading ok. from here I configured it to connect to an ad hoc wifi network and send udp packets at the gateway ip.

On the server side I setup a simple echo UDP server, which displays which button is pressed, which i had up and and running by the end of the evening. some error handling and receive confirmation still needs to be done but it's a test bed to work from.

This leaves the next step to get a more permanent perfboard version, and rig it up into a 3d printed case. From there I can consider the feasibility of using custom pcb for the production version.