Beginner here. Designed a PC Arcade Controller, trying to figure out how to make it work.

I love your energy and I know you are going to pull this off.

My son and I made a controller and wireless receiver to control our R2D2.  It entailed making our own Printed Circuit Boards.  It was a long journey (see video).  If you pull this off, you can build anything.

I'd first point that energy to make a prototyping rig.  You need a bread board, jumper (DuPont) cables, your switches/thumbsticks, and an Arduino.

Then proceed as follows:

• Get the Arduino blink example to work.
• Get the Arduino to output your thumbstick position
• Get the Arduino to output the position of a switch
• Get the Arduino to output the position of every switch using shift registers.

After that, then we'll talk what's the best embedded microcontroller.  It may be the Teensy.  It could be an Arduino pro mini.  It could be a custom circuit board you make that has their open source designs built in minus the pins you don't need.

See ya',

Sean

Thank you for the kind words!

So after looking around, I think I should start with an Arduino Uno, yes?

Depends on what you want to accomplish.

-Choose the Arduino that has the number of input/output pins that you want. Looking at my Uno it uses pin 2 through pin 13 without any tweaking. That means you have 12 pins available to sense if a button is being pressed.

     -Per joystick it will need at least 4 pins on the arduino, and then of course each button you want will also need a pin.

     -Unless you are using parts I'm not familiar with, then it looks like you'll need 20 pins. 4 per joystick and then 12 for the pushbuttons.

Again, off the top of my head it seems like you'd need an Arduino with more pins available for inputs. Maybe the Arduino MEGA 2560? It has 54 pins, more than enough for your uses. Also if you continue enjoying working with Arduino boards then you will never find a project you can't accomplish with 54 input pins.

Wait, I need 4 analog pins per joystick? I thought each analog stick only used 2 pins: an x and y.. Could you explain please?

An Arduino input at it's very basic level can either sense when voltage is being applied to the pin (true or on) or when there is no voltage on the pin (false or off.)

Without getting too complex, you can either have example 1, which is a joystick connected to its own chip that will output a number that arduino will read (then you can read that value and say okay, that value means forward, left, backward, right etc.) Or you can, example 2, have a joystick where when you push up, it pushes the "up" button and the arduino reads that as a voltage on the pin it's connected to.

In the second example, that joystick is more like a stick connected to a gamepad. Thus you treat each axis like it's two buttons. On the y-axis you have up and down button. On the x-axis you have left and right button. 4 buttons total.

It can get more complicated for sure, and a lot of joysticks don't work as simply as I described, but for your first Arduino project, keep it simple! It's just as important to limit how much you have to do on your first project so that you can at least have something you can test rather than chasing the perfect gamepad setup on your first try!

Ohhh no, I'm not using a switch joystick. The Joystick and the thumbstick are both analog.

Good discussion.  Your thumbstick is probably just two mechanically driven potentiometers that center on Vcc/2.  So, not counting power and ground, you will consume two pins per stick.

Get you the prototyping rig (bread board, jumper (DuPont) cables, your switches/thumbsticks, and an Arduino) rocking and rolling and we'll go from there.  Once you achieve that, you might want to build an R2D2 instead.

-Sean

I believe the thumbstick uses pots, but the U360 Joystick uses hall effect sensors with a magnet at the bottom of the joystick shaft.

Still outputs an X and Y signal, so it should work the same way, right?

Hahaa.. I'm not crazy about Star Wars, but I probably won't stop at building an arcade stick!

Ah okay! Yep, definitely a way to get the joystick info. Hall effect sensors use voltage to determine direction, so you would read the voltage at the pins in order to find the direction and distance the joystick was pushed. Still should be fine using that with Arduino.

The tricky bit will be once you prototype your board with the hardware, is figuring out how to handle the joystick information in the Arduino coding.

I agree with Sean that you should go ahead and build the prototype because once everything is hooked up, the coding section is a whole other animal. Good idea to build it and get excited for it, then we'll tackle the software side

Maybe this will help. Arduino is on the left. Each one of those lines represents a wire going somewhere. That +5V which is your power rail will connect to one side of your switch. Then an input pin wire will run from an Arduino pin to the switch in series with a 50K Ohm pull-up resistor. Also that little tail coming off the right bottom of the switch means its connected to ground. If you can see, that means that the 5V power line is connected directly to an input pin THROUGH your switch AND the 50K ohm resistor. This means that when your button is not pressed, the Arduino will "see" the button at 5V but as soon as you press the button the power line will be connected to your ground instead of your input pin and the voltage will drop to 0. Arduino will then see that 0V as a sign the button has been pressed.

I hope this drawing isnt confusing, I only actually filled in how Button 1 will work, but the rest of the buttons will be wired and will work the exact same way. As for the joysticks, they will be a bit different so I figured we'll wait on those.