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The Joypad That Became A Rotary Controller

Posted by timothy on from the chaka-khan dept.

jaromil writes "Speaking of human/computer interface, so simple, so neat, a usb knob to switch among desktops can give us quite some feeling about operating a machine... how about such controls around the monitor?" The knob in this case is switching between different effects possible with EffecTV. This make me wonder what creative uses people are putting Griffin's PowerMate to.

3 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Wait a minute by ravenspear · · Score: 5, Funny

    knob...can give us quite some feeling...

    I think I already have one of those.

    1. Re:Wait a minute by uberchicken · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yeah. I'm suspicious. The caption for LifeTV reads "My seeds flow on the net". Uh huh.

  2. Some notes on USB interfacing... by enginuitor · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The fact that the author used a USB game pad as the electronic base of his device brings up an issue which increasingly plagues electronics hobbyists... Manufacturers are beginning to see many useful protocols (such as RS232) as obsolete and completely remove support for them from their products. While the average American consumer, who uses arbitrary metrics and units-of-measurement-become-buzzwords (megapixels... gigahertz... etc.) to judge the worth of a device, would not care much about seeing those ugly trapezoidal plugs disappear from the back of their computers, it presents a huge problem for us hobbyists who rely on good-old '232 and similar "old" interfaces for easy communication with a computer. Anyone who's ever written (or tried to write) USB interface code knows that's Hell to work with. Fortunately, though, there are solutions... including handy interface chips which handle all the nasty USB work and provide a simple asynchronous serial interface on the project end. However, I still will never buy a motherboard without RS232!