Hello all,
After spending time tinkering, taking things apart and lots of reading I've decided to dive into trying a modding project. I have an old Belkin Nostromo n50 Speedpad controller and would really like it to be wireless for use with my HTPC in my living room. I have done some research into wireless controller mods and have found that the 4800bps (434MHz) RF Link Receivers and Transmitters like the ones sold on Sparkfun (and I'm sure in the Element 14 store as well but I haven't found them yet) would probably do the trick for the wireless communication portion. However, everything I have found says that these simple transmitters and receivers require that the signal sent to them be processed by a microcontroller of some kind.
So my question is this: What type of microcontroller would be best suited for a conversion mod like this? Taking into account size, power efficiency and cost.
I have considered a standard Arduino Uno type programmable chip and would be comfortable programming and using one of those for this project, but I thought it best to ask if there was something more suitable.
Additionally, if there is anyone on here who has experience with gamepads like the Belkin Nostromo line I would greatly appreciate any insights you might have on them specifically. I opened mine up today and it looks fairly straightforward. I even see a chip in there that looks an awful lot like a microcontroller but I don't know how to check to be sure since I can't seem to find a good teardown resource for the n50 model.
Thank you all for your time and while this is my first ever post as a member of the Element 14 community I'm sure it won't be my last.
UPDATE: After doing some more digging I found that the chip inside my Nostromo that I thought looked like a microcontroller chip appears to be a CY7C63743-PC chip made by Cypress Semiconductors. Based on the datasheet of pinouts I found for it I'm fairly certain that is in fact a microcontroller chip. So now I need to figure out how to get into its programming and see if I can use it to handle the signal modulation to the new RF transmitter.
I'm leaving this question marked unanswered for now in case I'm wrong about that chip and in case anyone has an alternative that would perform better or some other insight on the project.