[DonRotolo]

In LabView you can use a kind-of 'wizard' block to manage the input device (to which the joystick is connected) and that will put put a varying signal (varying according to the joystick position). You can then scale this to a range of 0-255 or whatever you prefer.

I'm not giving the gory details because they change according to the specific input device. For the NI USB-6009 Data Acquisition (DAQ) Device we have, the "DAQ Assistant" can be configured for several different kinds of analog or digital input (for example, resistance, voltage, strain, temperature, current, acceleration....).

The signal from this DAQ Assistant block can be coupled to a second block to scale it, the output as a PWM pulse train by a third block to a Victor, for example. The cool thing is that to program it, you can drop in "Virtual" blocks to simulate your hardware, you don't even need to have a physical device.

Read the tutorials. Get a Lego Mindstorms NXT kit (which uses a form of LabView). Get LabView and run it, play around. You have 121 days.....GO!

Don

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