Controlling a Mindstorms Robot With a Playstation 2 Controller

This was probably the first real hardware or software project I ever completed. Prior to this, my software projects were toy things that amounted to little more than "hello world". Or the hardware equivalent, blinking some LEDs. It was fairly involved for my skills at the time; assembly, c, soldering / bread-boarding, and a little reverse engineering.

The basic idea was to use a Playstation 2 controller to drive a (dirt simple) robot made using the Lego Mindstorms kit. To connect the PS2 controller to the Lego Mindstorms control unit (RCX) I used a PIC microcontroller.

The beginnings of this project were three-fold:

• I had a PS2 controller connected to a Windows computer via the parallel port, but I wanted to connect it to a Linux computer.
• I had recently taken my first harware oriented class, "Introduction to Assembly", and promptly went out and bought "Programming and Customizing PICmicro Microcontrollers" by Myke Predko.
• I had recently purchased a Lego Minstorms kit to play with, which was a great expense for a lowly student at the time.