PIC Tutorial - Joystick Board


Joystick Board

This is the Joystick Board, used for connecting a standard PC analogue joystick. It connects to 4 pins of one port and uses a simple capacitor charging technique to read the analogue resistance of the joystick. The circuit is nice and simple, R1 and R2 are pull-up resistors for the two trigger buttons on the joystick (which connect either pin 2 or pin 7 of the 15 way D connector to ground). The analogue inputs are on pins 3 and 6, and consist of 100K variable resistors from these pins to pin 1 (the 5V supply). From the analogue controls we feed through R3 or R4, these are to set the minimum resistance (2.2K when the joystick controls are at minimum). The current through these resistors is used to charge C2 (or C1), and the charging time is dependent on the value of the joystick + R3 (or R4). To read the controls we discharge the capacitor (by setting the relevant port pin to an output and setting it low), then reset the port pin to be an input and wait until the capacitor charges enough to make the input switch high - during this time we maintain a 16 bit count - this gives us a value based on the position of the joystick.

Although it's labelled as connecting to PortB, as with most of the boards, it can also be connected to PortA if required.

This is the top view of the Joystick Board.
The bottom of the Joystick Board.

Back to hardware page