USB Accelerometer Controller

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szZv2YYQm0U]

As you can see above, there is no wiimote in that accessory steering wheel. There is, instead, a home-made accelerometer controller that connects to the pc via USB. Based around a PIC 18F2550 and a 2 axis accelerometer, this device is detected by windows as a standard controller. The schematic and source code are available on his website. He says it can also be used as a “motion mouse”. You can see a video of that after the break.

When we first saw the video, we thought it might be the same person as the accelerometer controlled maze project, due to the wiimote steering wheel casing.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k13UPjzrauk]

[via make]

10 thoughts on “USB Accelerometer Controller

  1. This doesn’t look to do anything that existing controllers can’t, but at least it is a good introduction to using an accelerometer that is well documented.

    Certainly the masses will be pleased to see he didn’t put an Arduino inside of it.

  2. @MS3FGX:
    “Certainly the masses will be pleased to see he didn’t put an Arduino inside of it.”
    Probably because the Arduino doesn’t support USB HID. I know that AVR, including the ATMega168 can support low-speed software USB through the V-USB firmware (formerly AVR-USB), but it isn’t really a great solution, IMHO. You can’t run any time-critical code with it (because of the USB interrupts) and I have not been able to make it work when I use an interrupt-driven method (my interrupt service routine probably delays a more important one)
    It does work, and I’ve made an input device with it, but it really limits what you can do.

  3. Nicely done- especially the mouse interface where you can see that the motion is smooth.

    Now where are the people complaining that he used a PIC? Sooo many people use PICs clearly it must be a bad thing.

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