Old games consoles never die... well sometimes they do. And at that point there are a few options to hack them back to life, and a great example is reusing the controllers to work with our Arduino platform. This has been demonstrated by Instructables member Finnio who documents the process of breaking down the controllers from a Sony PSOne, so that you can access the dual thumbsticks and read their position with analogue inputs.
This is ideal if you're creating a remote control for robots, or anything else that needs more control than is available from simple buttons. The results are demonstrated in the following video:
For complete instructions about this hack, check out the Instructable page. And we're on twitter and Google+, so follow us for news and product updates as well.
Another take on analogue game controllers is to use an accelerometer - allowing you to make a gravity-sensing game controller which is easy with our AM3X:
With this module you can measure various movements and changes in g-force. This tiny 3-axis accelerometer module can operate in either +/-1.5g or +/-6g ranges, giving your project the ability to tell which way is up. Ideal for robotics projects, tilt sensors, vehicle dataloggers, and whatever else you can dream up. It even has a "zero g!" output to detect when the device is in free-fall, so you could connect that to an "interrupt" pin on an Arduino to have your project react immediately if it's dropped! For more information and to order, visit the product page.
