Bs2 with ps2 controller?

sam-98 · October 23, 2006, 10:46pm

Hello evryone,

I presently have a basic stamp 2E (8 times the memory of the bs2). so for christmas I wanted to buy a cable to connect a ps2 controller to the ABB, the ABB and a ps2 controller. I would like to ask this question :

-I have hear that the BS2 cant read propoly one of the joysticks I think… but can I control my robot via a ps2 controller and a bs2? if I dont use the joysticks, will it work conrrectly (I plan on upgrading when I have the money to a Basic atom pro). ? and, exactly, what can a bs2 control conrectly with a ps2 controller?

Sam, thanks for your answers

nickreiser · October 23, 2006, 11:16pm

Yea, I’ve heard that a couple times.
As far as I know, everything but that direction of the joystick works fine.
As to why it can’t properly read it, I have no clue…

robotdude · October 24, 2006, 2:07pm

The Basic Stamp II can’t be connected to the PS2 game controller because it’s serin command does not allow you to invert the clock line. It just happened to be the case that the PS2 game controller didn’t match the way Parallax decided to do the serin command. We added an inverter to the Bot Board and setup a special PS2 game controller port for BS2 users. Even with this hardware addition the BS2 can’t read the right vertical joystick because it’s shiftin command reads the data on the falling edge of the clock instead of the rising edge of the clock. The data for that A to D is the last one in the string, so there is no good way to fix this. Parallax wrote a long cumbersome program to bit bang the serin command, but it was so slow and took so much of the processors resources it was too crippled to do much of anything else. If you only need one joystick then it does work well. So compare this with the Basic Atom. All of the aspects of the serin command are user configurable. So you can easily get full axis of the two joysticks and all 16 buttons. Hope this helps.

I edited the word shiftin instead of serin as I typoed it.

sam-98 · October 25, 2006, 12:14am

The Basic Stamp II can’t be connected to the PS2 game controller because it’s serin command does not allow you to invert the clock line. It just happened to be the case that the PS2 game controller didn’t match the way Parallax decided to do the serin command. We added an inverter to the Bot Board and setup a special PS2 game controller port for BS2 users. Even with this hardware addition the BS2 can’t read the right vertical joystick because it’s serin command reads the data on the falling edge of the clock instead of the rising edge of the clock. The data for that A to D is the last one in the string, so there is no good way to fix this. Parallax wrote a long cumbersome program to bit bang the serin command, but it was so slow and took so much of the processors resources it was too crippled to do much of anything else. If you only need one joystick then it does work well. So compare this with the Basic Atom. All of the aspects of the serin command are user configurable. So you can easily get full axis of the two joysticks and all 16 buttons. Hope this helps.

Thanks that’s what I tought, but I wanted to make sure…

oh and thank you Nick too

Sam

acidtech · October 28, 2006, 7:21pm

Actually, it is the BS2 SHIFTIN command that required the inverter, IIRC. Also the reason the last joystick couldn’t be read in the original PS2 controller code(I don’t remember the guys name who did it but I think he’s the one that did some of the mroe well know BS2 books) has to do with how shiftin work on the BS2.