USB Joystick as a controller?

[jcunning007]

So this weekend I tried a friends plane, and it was a nightmare :confused: .

I'm a traditional pilot and I need my stick and throttle.

Is there a way to we could use my laptop and a usb joystick to fly the plane.

Convert the output from my laptop to the transmitter?

Sorry if this a common question but all I can find is connecting the rc controller to PC, not the other way round.

[Lakc]

It has been touched on before but I dont recall anyone actually finishing the project.

[jeffs555]

Here is one interface. http://www.welwyn.demon.co.uk/PC_RC/PC_to_RC.htm It is fairly old and uses the parallel port on the PC. With the difficulty of accessing the parallel port under XP and 2000 a serial interface version would probably be better.

[JeffElecRC]

I think the difficulty with a USB joystick to TX interface would be that you either have to use the Laptop or a custom electronics solution. The laptop might pose a problem unless you can get a real-time operating system (such as Minuet or RT Linux), otherwise you might lose control as Windoze decides to do something stupid.

On the other hand it would also be tough to find a non-PC way of accepting a USB joystick. You would need something like Atmel's USB host controller and a microprocessor with a Real Time OS. Seems like a lot of work to just output a couple frames of PPM.

That said here's what I plan on doing in the near future for a Joystick interface: a) use an older Game-port style joystick and interface it with a atmel microcontroller. All the buttons are on-off signals and axis are variable resistance. I tiwll be a simple matter to sample these signals and output them into a PPM frame. One could also hack a USB joystick and read the buttons and potentiometers in the same way.

Hope that helps.