Team 1515 has driven a fairly unique "gamepad" in the past 2 years- touch screen. We use a single 3 axis joystick to control the drive (both years mecanum) and the touch-screen to control everything else.
It's really quite cool. For instance, in Logomotion, we had 2 main screens: Drive and Maintenance modes.
Within Maintenance mode, there were animated thumbnails of the mecanum wheels, and FWD/Rev buttons, 2 speeds each. This allowed us to completely test the drivetrain. Addtionally, we had the ability to control both our forklift style lift and pneumatic joints in the arm. For the forklift, we had both absolute and relative control. We could also deploy the minibot.
Within Drive mode, every thing was streamlined in order to ensure speedy gameplay. To raise our lift, when on absolute control, we could touch any peg on the full onscreen pegboard, thus causing the lift to go to that height. (It was self-calibrating, every time it touched the bottom, it registered 0). When on relative control, we could simply press UP and DOWN arrows to take the lift to that height. Of course the pneumatics were simple, press and they change position. When the operator pressed the 'Deploy Minibot" button, an "are you sure" window popped up, and on OK, it deployed.
Consequently, we won the Innovation in Control in both the Los Angeles and Denver regional this year. The screen was a donation from a local company. The connection between the touchscreen and the classmate is relatively complex. It utilizes an industrial PLC from Automation direct and a cypress carrier board. However, if your team has the resources with which to build one, it makes the driving experience incredibly simple.
