Accelerometer Based USB Gamepad and Mouse

The project is a steering wheel gamepad with accelerometer and is based on a PIC18F2550/PIC18F4550 microcontroller.

There are 2 axes accelerometer with +2g being used by the gamepad as it works directly from USB that provides 5V. the device can also be used as USB motion (tilt/pan) mouse for dragging cursor along the screen and performing different tasks without the use of table and with a slightly different firmware but the same hardware. This is made possible by programming the PIC18F2550 as HID USB since it has a native USB interface. It can be easily recognized by different operating systems such as Windows XP, Vista, and 7. The steering wheel shell is handy and suitable for doing some serious racing games.

In the design, there is an option to connect 2 more buttons to RB2 and RB3. The PIC Basic code developed can work on both 18F4550/18F2550 microcontrollers.The hex file for the PIC can be transferred to the chip by using a PIC programmer like PICKit2.

Before plugging the device, any Microchip device should be disconnected since the same HID VENDOR ID is used to avoid the occurrence of hardware conflict.

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