Small Arcade Joystick (product 480)

[lineber]

Hi, I am trying to find the datasheet for product 480, the small arcade joystick. https://www.adafruit.com/products/480

I though this product had enough wires to send parallel signals. But after looking at it closer, I realized it have one to few wires to work the way i imagined.

So the product seems to be serial. If I can look at the datasheet I might be able to figure out how to get this to work with the arduino or the parallel load to 8 bit ic chip I bought. Or if there is a tutorial that explains how to connect 5 wire serial cables to an arduino that would be helpful too. But considering I have no clue which pins do what I would like something specific to this device.

Thanks,

-Jerry

[adafruit_support_rick]

The device simply has 4 microswitches, one for each cardinal direction. Diagonal joystick positions activate two switches. The output leads are the four switches and ground. Sounds like maybe you're thinking of a proportional joystick instead?

[lineber]

Yeah, I had somebody at my hackerspace explain the same thing to me. For some reason, I thought for parallel to work I needed a common ground and supply . Broke out the multimeter and tested each position. Works perfectly.

Thanks for the quick reply.

-Jerry

[RufusTheFirefly]

I am trying to use this on a project right now and I feel like I'm missing something. There are five wires coming out of the joystick, I believe that one is ground and the other four are switches (one for each direction). But unless there is a battery inside the joystick, where does the power come from (so the input pin on my arduino will know when the switch has been activated)? It seems like all the wires are outputs so there is no power coming into the joystick that can form the circuit.

Right now when I plug it into the arduino I get no response or, at best, a kind of random response unrelated to which way the joystick is being moved.

Please help!

Thanks,
Jeff

[adafruit_support_bill]

The common pin goes to ground. The other 4 connect to digital pins. If you enable the internal pullup resistors on those pins, they will be pulled up to 5v until the switch is closed.

http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/pinMode

[RufusTheFirefly]

Thanks -- that worked great!

[adafruit_support_bill]

You are welcome Rufus