Friday, January 6, 2012

USB Devboard Milestone!

[Originally Posted: December 30 2011]

I got a soldering iron for Christmas. Which has been awesome.  I finished up all of the soldering that I wanted to do from early December. I put some current limiting resistors in the joy pad I made. 

I then finally found a demo Microchip did with the PIC18F4550 which i think is a roundabout way of finding the project I originally based my development board on. Cool!

The demo dealt with playing around with the Generic USB-HID drivers that come with windows. You remember this pane:
Image Credit: devshed.com

Well that's what this demo program that I found works with. We're making a joystick! 


With a good deal more tweaking I got the ADC's working (properly, at that) and was outputting proper XY coordinates to the screen!  Next thing I knew I did something that I am looking forward to doing in the future more properly. I was racing in a video game, driving with my own board that I put together with some hacked together firmware!

I'm very excited about this. It means that I won't have to go too deep into the USB descriptors anymore (although I will still). It also means that the project I had in mind (Take real car-controls and make a driver-sim out of it) is not only feasible, but partially done in firmware and hardware now. 

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