CE432-1 Robotics II 2021 Fall
Joystick control
Name: Mychael Garcia
Email: mhgarcia@fortlewis.edu

Materials:
Joystick controll:

For this project we used the Arduino UNO, analog joystick, 2.4 GHz transceiver, and stepper motor to wirelessly send signals to a second Arduino UNO. One board would record inputs from the joystick and use the serial interface and send them to the transmitter. The second board would use its own transceiver and send the values to the Arduino and print the values to the serial monitor. Later, a stepper motor was added to visualize the results.

Task 1:
For the first task we were asked to take the signal from the joystick and print the results in the serial monitor. This worked well as the joystick had 3 functions; a potentiometer for the x-axis, a potentiometer for the y-axis, and a button that would activate if the entire joystick was pressed. The switch would display a 1 if it was pressed or a 0 if it wasn't. For the x and y axis, they would be displayed as a number between 0 - 1023. 1023 is 2^(10)-1, this is the maximum bit rate of the Arduino (10-bit).
serial monitor

If the joystick was pushed down and to the far left, for the x and y axis respectfully, the numbers would display values close to 0.
min

If the joystick was pushed up and to the far right, for the x and y axis respectfully, the numbers would display values close to 1023.
max


Task 2:
This task was roughly the same as the first but instead the signal need to be transmitted wirelessly to a second Arduino board which would then print this to the serial monitor. This was accomplished by connecting a 2.4 Ghz transceiver to each Arduino board and using one as a transmitter and one as a receiver. These modules were very easy to set up, and within the code they would be defined as a separate serial device. (BlueSerial). The first receiver code was designed to print out one number of the analog joystick at a time.
split

Each number was considered to be its own separte value. This was then changed so the receiver would have its own internal buffer, It would not print anything till a message end condition was met (\n). This would tell the Arduino it has finished transmitting one message and can print the number as a completed line, not broken up as seen above.
beffer


Task 3:
For the final task we gave the Arduino that was receiving the information an additional task, to control the direction of a stepper motor. This was done by the use of a simple if statement, if the received value was a given amount away from the joysticks idle state (around 500) the motor would turn in a given direction. 


Conclusion:

Overall this project was simple yet made a complicated task easy to understand and manipulate. We learned how to wirelessly communicate with two Arduino boards and use that signal as a way to control a stepper motor.
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