January 28, 2012

Arduino Game Port Interface

A while back I got my hands on an old analog PC joystick, and since then I have been meaning to build an adapter make the joystick work over USB.  The adapter I finally built consists of an Arduino connected to a game port I hacked off an old sound card.  The Arduino reads the analog (x and y movement) and digital (buttons) inputs and then sends them to the computer over serial.  Then a Processing script running on the computer reads the serial data, and converts it into mouse movements and clicks using the Java Robot class.