Oh that is clever!

Sure, just replace one resistance-changing device for another and harvest the output! Why not?

maybe not the most direct or efficient way to do things, but it utilizes existing stuff effectively in a way not thought of, at least by me.

Good O!

Ohh. A true and worthy hack. That’s slick. My question is how far can the sensors be away?

hal, obviously the longer the distance the more the resistance which would have to be calibrated with the know limit of the controller being a value of 65534 (unit16 max) and given at three feet 100 degrees it returns a reading of around 40K there is some range before it looses its upper limits.

At neutral position it returns a value of 32767 so if you removed the potentiometer (or if you went the more hacky method and taped it the bottom left position) you should be able to get yourself a little more room. Given some decent soldering and wire you should be able to get a good 50-100 feet though would definitely recommend the shorter the better.

solenoidclock:
lighters and cans of compressed air.
OR, if you are totally hardcore, breath power.

Nice hack!

But PS2 controllers actually have 12 analog inputs (L. X & Y, R. X & Y, four face buttons, and four triggers) and four digital (sel, start, L3, R3). I’m not sure if the analog button inputs are that linear/accurate/precise/etc. but they return an 8-bit value (BTW, I’m pretty sure the stick axes are 8-bit, too).

The only hitch to using the buttons is the USB adapter mentioned in the article. Those usually digitize the buttons since windows doesn’t support them. However, if you went with an XBox pad, which is basically the same but natively USB, a custom driver (Google “redcl0ud” or “libusb win32″) could retrieve any/all analog inputs.

On second thought…
Might be a bit dangerous…

I just keep wondering what the display will do to my hair if I lose a game.

Better put up some sunglasses.