Tuesday 11 May 2010

Operator Present Hack

In order to add the operator present indication to the P&G JC400 joysticks, I had to hack a sensor capacitive touch sensor onto the joystick. To do this I added a brass ring around the top of the grip, and using one of the unused Z axis wires, connected this to a sensor PCB inside the control box. I also tied a PCB sensor on the top of the grip, however, this interfered with the fir of the rubber grip cover, so I reverted to a few coils of wire on the top which also connect the brass ring to the sensor PCB.