Completed 6 Axis PC Controller

You might remember the article of the in progress 6 Axis PC Controller, well it is now complete. This thing is very impressive, doesn’t look like the standard weekend DIY because of the complexity.

“My microcontroller doesn’t have built-in I2C or SPI, so I needed to implement one of my own. I also didn’t have interrupt pins available, meaning my solution needed to be based on polling. When all was said and done and optimized, I couldn’t detect edges faster than 16Khz. This is about ten times slower than the shift output available from the CUBLOC controller, so I couldn’t use that. I ended up writing my own shift-out routine in BASIC to get the data to the HID Portal. This could be avoided by using a microcontroller that has SPI or I2C built in already, but the JB8 is what I had on hand.

I use three signals to communicate with the CUBLOC controller. First, there is a CLK signal. The HID Portal detects a rising edge. At that point, it reads the value present on the DATA line. This is shifted into a register until a byte has been received, and the code moves to the next byte. The /RST line is a way to synchronize the start of each data packet in case there was any spurious input; when LOW it sets the packet and bit indexes to zero.”