Advice needed on controller board for steering tiller

[Softpxl 4]

Idk if there are people here who have some knowledge/experience with making their own controllers or hardware, so if you do please help me out a bit if you can.

For the past year I've been designing a steering tiller based on the Boeing 777's steering tiller and all I need now is a controller board with a USB port(preferable USB A or USB C) for reading a single axis input from left to right.
As of now I wanna using a part of an old racing wheel that I salvaged until I figured out the dimensions for the final build of the housing(see spoiler below). All I need now is a controller board that can fit this header(again, see spoiler below below).

Spoiler

A friend of mine said something about an arduino-esque board with an atmega chip, iirc an atmega32u4 chip specifically.
But I would like some recommendations on which brands would be decent for long term use and maximum compatibility with the current flightsims (xplane, p3d, msfs). And preferably a board that has a small enough form factor.
The latter point is, bc if I do need to put it away, it won't take up a whole cabinet.

So if anyone has some recommendations, please let me know.