Re: [avr-gcc-list] Gamepad

[Daniel O'Connor]

On Thu, 17 Nov 2005 05:45, Sumeet Pal Singh wrote:
> Sorry for putting this mail here, but I thought since this mailing list
> deals with avr u people will be electronics hobbist and may help me.
> I am designing a robot for a competition. It is manual and needs a
> controller, for which I figured to use a gamepad, sony/dreamcast, but thhe
> problem is interfacing it with atmega16. Can someone tell where to find
> datasheets foe these/ what are the pins supposed to be connected to.
> The dreamcast remote has a rotating control for speed, how does that thing
> work and how do i read it.

I'd imagine you'd be hard pressed to find a datasheet for a game console 
controller.. About the best you could hope for is that someone has reverse 
engineered it. Even then it's likely they won't publish the details.

I would suggest that you get an *old* PC joystick (ie one with a D15 connector 
that plugs into a game port) and use that. They have simple close contact 
switches and pots you can read with an ADC.

There is an interested (but gross :) analog stick.. an old MS sidewinder - it 
has pseudo analog mode, but if you read from it in the right sequence it goes 
into digital mode where it sends data out via the joystick button lines.. 
Gross, but pretty neat all the same :) There is some Linux code which groks 
this beast.. 
http://glide.stanford.edu/lxr/source/drivers/input/joystick/sidewinder.c?v=linux-2.6.10

MS even have a patent on it..

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
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