[Jon Stratis]

I know its not what you want to hear... but honestly, I think using the old robot controller would be easiest. As Al said, getting joysticks wired up to victors is doable, but does require a certain amount of knowledge that most teams aren't exposed to (I imagine that going out and building/designing circuits isn't top on everyone's list during the build season).

Last year, our team worked on a small pick-and-place robot for off season practice, using the old control system. By simply commenting out a few lines of code, we could bypass the communication with the OI entirely, and feed our inputs (a few switches) into the robot controller directly. So, it's pretty easy to throw out the OI and any communications for a self contained project like this. If you decide to go this route and want some help getting the code working with the robot controller, feel free to send me a message. I can get you pointed in the right direction.