Playstation controller

I had decided a while back that I needed to build a new, more capable controller for RC vehicles & robots. The goals were:
• More buttons for various functions
• More analog inputs than a single joystick
• Operated with two hands
• LCD display to show data sent back by the vehicle

I was about to start designing a board when I came across a PS2 controller. These can be found really cheap now that the PS3 has obsoleted them. Using these controller for robots is not a new idea, lots of people have done it, and they’ve put all kinds of information on the internet about how to interface with them. The controllers communicate with a form of SPI. It’s regular SPI except that the bit order is flipped to lsb first (where standard SPI is msb first). The protocol is close enough that I can use the built-in MSSP hardware in the PIC parts I’m using, if I do some data manipulation before and after exchanges. Thanks to all the people who have worked out the protocol and shared their findings, I got the controller working very quickly.

I wrote robot controller code for the PIC16F1516 (same as the one on the SAVIC board) that can talk to the PS2 controller, a Nordic radio, and a character LCD. The radio and the controller share the SPI bus, but they have different settings for clock polarity and data sampling edge, so I have to switch the MSSP settings before I activate each one with its slave select line. Later I’ll use the LCD to show data coming back from the vehicle, but for now it was just used to help me work out the bugs with the PS2 controller. It turns out the analog sticks on these give pretty messy readings, even with the genuine Sony controller. To counteract this, I’ve added a bunch of processing that the analog readings go through to center them and to apply a logarithmic curve to the output. The code can also poll the controller for which mode it’s in, so it asks you to activate analog mode before it does the centering and starts transmitting.

This first try worked out so well that I will definitely stick with the PS2 controller for robots moving forward. I’m currently working on talking to a graphic LCD so I’ll be able to display images from a camera on the vehicle. Once that’s finalized, I plan to build an add-on that attaches to the front of the controller that contains a battery, radio, LCD, and the microcontroller to operate them all.

Here’s the code for the robot controller.