[BrianBSL]

Originally Posted by eugenebrooks

You can find high quality single turn pots in at www.digikey.com,
paying around $10 for a very nice Bourns unit if you want. The most
significant problem for building a joystick is the mechanical lingage.
This is where most of your effort would be focused.

Have you considered buying a USB joystick and then gutting the
electronics? All you would need to do is find one that uses 100K
pots internally, custom wire them to suitable inputs on the OI and
then you would be done. Any centering adjustments could be handled
by putting a lower resistance pot in series. Alternatively, you could
use a switch input to the OI to command the RC to read the pots
and use that value for "center," taking one more adjustment that
can get messed up out of the equation.

Eugene

The problem is that many of today's USB joysticks don't use pots at all and use optical or magnetic sensing systems instead. Not having trim adjustments is a pretty good sign of not using pots. We even tried using a Microsoft Sidewinder 3d Pro - a 3 axis joystick that's digital overdrive (digital over joystick port) but is also backwards compatible in analog mode. Unfortunately it outputs varying voltage rather than varying resistance, making the values that the OI sees pretty useless. We thought about running it through an ADC and then into a multiplexed resistor array but it just seemed like too much trouble, and then we decided a 2nd joystick did a better job anyways.