Wolfmans Howlings

A programmers Blog about Programming solutions and a few other issues

Converting a Sidewinder 3D pro joystick to USB

Posted by Jim Morris on Sat Oct 24 14:50:02 -0700 2009

In playing with my new Rovio I decided that my Old MS Sidewinder 3D Pro Joystick would be an excellent way to control it, as it has the twist which can rotate the Rovio, and the joystick up/left/down/right can move the Rovio in those directions while still facing forward.

The problem is that the joystick has a game port connector, and my Linux workstation does not have a game-port. After doing the obligatory Googling I found this Exactly what I needed, except this was for Windows not Linux. Thinking I would have to modify the code I contacted Grendel who graciously sent me the source code for the project, however it turns out the code he wrote was so good it works as is on Linux, I just needed to modprobe sidewinder and it worked.

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Posted in Linux,Embedded,Robotics  |  Tags joystick,usb,soldering  |  1 comments

Fun with a PC104 board, embedded Linux and wifi

Posted by Jim Morris on Wed Oct 21 01:32:16 -0700 2009

Around 10 years ago I was playing with some home robotics, built a simple robot, with some sensors and an on-board Linux-based PC. The purpose was to experiment with Robot AI, a continuation of my PhD thesis I started on some 30 years ago, but did not complete.

The robot had a camera, a digital compass, a sonar scanner and a short range IR range detector, plus some bump detectors. I could control it over a wifi connection, that was a Orinoco PCMCIA board plugged into the PC104, 586 based Linux PC that was on-board. All powered by several batteries.

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Posted in Linux,Embedded  |  Tags linux,pc104,wpa_supplicant,microdrive  |  no comments