Pure sweetness

It took a book of tweaking, but I got it to work. I hooked up my original xbox s-controller to my laptop, wrote a little sketch and a C program, and got the x-axis on the left analog stick to control the position of a servo. I'll post the code here soon and a video to youtube. It uses SDL for the joystick and I found a little serial program that I used to help send data to the arduino decima. Freaking exciting. The next step is to buy some xbee stuff and get it to work wirelessly. After that, I should be able to build a platform for a robot that I can have some fun with.

A new day, time to start up again

Alright, my ideas about using the joystick have been replaced by using an xbox controller that I spliced with a usb cord. I'm got a hold of a servo that I'm going to try to connect to the arduino. Now, if I could control the servo with the xbox controller I'd be just one step short of taking over the world.

Now, to put this into perspective, I found an open source circuit simulator available in the ubuntu repositories that I'm going to try to build a motor control with. I have a bunch of high power bjts that hopefully will be able to drive some power window motors. Now, if I could hook up the arduino and use my christmas money to buy a xbee starter kit, I'd have a mobile platform that I could build off of.

Well, I have my work cut out for me. Hopefully I don't get too side tracked. I am currently working on a quadrotor and want to write a 3d simulator for it that goes beyond the simulink file my teacher uses. Anyway, off to try to get the servo working. Then to try to get the controller to interface with the servo...