The arm we are building will need some form of control. Since we are cost minded, and we happened to have an old 15 pin gaming joystick laying around, we decided to hack it for our purposes.

I was able to search up some pin-out guides for the joystick outputs:

http://www.epanorama.net/documents/joystick/pc_joystick.html

http://pinouts.ru/Inputs/GameportPC_pinout.shtml

Here is the setup I came up with.

I have some simple arduino code reading in the analog and digital outputs from the joystick. As the guide was not exact for the joystick we happen to have, I had to do some testing to determine which physical inputs were linked to each particular pin.

Here I tested the x-axis (arbitrarily named), of the joystick.

Here are the outputs I was testing and logging.

I found that two of the digital outputs were linked to two buttons, the third button seemed unresponsive (which is ok, because we don’t necessarily need it). In addition, the two axes on the joystick work fine, as well as a side wheel. These analog inputs give us ranges on outputs from ~500 through 1023. I used 100Kohm divider resistors in the breadboard circuit. I think changing these could help out with our current resolution/input range.

There are clearly a few kinks to figure out, but we should be able to create controls for our project using this joystick.