Cyber Blue had this wearable robot arm for the 2001 season. It was made with potentiometers on the arm that corresponded to the potentiometers on the robot so it mimicked the movement of the human arm. This won us an award at every competition that year including the Delphi "Driving Tomorrow's Technology Award" at the National Championships. Below is a picture of the robot and wearable arm.








More images of the arm can be seen here: http://www.cyberblue234.com/images/RobotArm/

Most joysticks with extra buttons have a special encoding IC that would not be compatible with the OI unless you could write a PBasic driver unfortunately... For two years we have had a joystick that has 3 digital buttons, a digital POV hat, and a trigger as well as the basic analog controls but we could only use the default ones since the encoder was incompatible. You could, however, open up the joystick and wire the extra buttons to use the AUX input pin or extra pins on a different port. If I remember correctly, some of the ports have pins from the other ones (I could be wrong though..I haven't taken a look at it since last year). If you could get those buttons to work, that would be quite cool... I might even give that a shot this year...