Society of Robots - Robot Forum
Electronics => Electronics => Topic started by: Nyx on May 05, 2008, 07:48:09 PM
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Hello,
I recently went to salvation army and grabbed an interesting device for $5. From the looks of it, it's a remote controller system for Commodore/Atari joysticks. It has a base with an RF antenna and two little wireless joysticks. The base has two Atari joystick plugs coming out of it. I was thinking this would make an interesting robot remote control... So I've been wondering how I could go about hooking this up to a PC. Practical ways of doing it seem to be using either a USB->Parallel adapter, or a USB->Game Port adapter.
It seems that the Atari controllers simply act as switches... The four directions having 4 different switches, and the two buttons having two extra switches. I'm wondering how I would go about hooking this up to either a parallel port, or a game port. How would I go about writing a "1" to one of the five parallel port inputs? Do I need to connect a separate 5V power source to those data lines (the 5V power source sharing the same ground as the parallel port?). I believe parallel ports don't provide their own 5V power. How about the game port? This has four button inputs, which I guess I can just connect to the 5V pin directly to write a "1"... I'm just not sure about the axes. There's X1, Y1 and X2, Y2 pins, which apparently measure resistance from 0 to 100 KOhms. I suppose I could connect these through 50K resistors, but where do I connect the other end of the resistor? To the 5V line?
Does someone have experience with game ports or parallel ports?
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It has a base with an RF antenna
You'd need a receiver . . . guessing the signal then building a receiver is definitely not worth the effort!
Look around for manuals/schematics/datasheets online. Open it up and see whats in it. Hook it up to an oscope to see what signals it produces, etc.