Hi all,
Thank you for all of your answers! I did indeed end up working on an accelerometer joystick and ended up creating a functional one. I have tested it with a robot and everything and it is awesome!
I went with the idea of using UnoJoy with an Arduino Uno I have lying around but found it nonfunctional. I never figured out why it did not work but I soon found a new method.
Using the firmware and type info from
this page, I was able to get my accelerometer joystick working. The communication seems fairly straight-forward. All it does is send an array through the serial interface to the usb chip and it shows that information to a PC.
I don't have any pictures of my controller or videos of robot driving, but I can tell you that it's pretty great! I have an LCD screen on there to tell you the speed formatted in the way WPILib sends speeds to motor controllers (a 16-bit range mapped to a -1 to 1 range). It drives suprisingly smoothly and it is not as sensitive as I thought it would be. Overall, it was a great project to work on! I strongly encourage others to look into exploring control options outside of those provided by FIRST!
You can look at my code
here. In the repository, I include the firmware files and the libraries that I used to create my joystick. I hope somebody can find this to be useful!
Once again, thank you for all of your help!
Alex Brinister