So I am in the Arduino water and have started to swim. I found a cheap off-brand Wii Nunchuk controller, made a PCB adapter for the plug and have it playing nice with my Duemilanove. I have also taken all the numbers coming from the nunchuk and converted them all to nice clean 0-255 ints. From there, I coded a serial receive loop so the whole unit could be used as a stand-alone plug-in to other devices. Basically, the chip just sits there and waits for a single character followed by a CR. I.e. if you send a "J",CR this "turns on" the joystick and the Arduino starts spitting out (via serial) the X and Y of the joystick. Send "J", CR again and it stops sending. Same with "A" for data from the accelerometer, and "B" for buttons. "O" is off --all of them off. You can turn one or all of the nunchuk's sensors on at any one time.
My intention going into this is for Walter's virtual control panel. I had a "virtual joystick" on-screen which was not very convient. It was very tough to watch your cursor on the screen whilst also watching the robot on the ground. Obviously, this lead to wanting a small, one-hand external joystick, attached to the computer, and feeding data to the control panel (Processing) --to be relayed out to Walter. This little nunchuck is not only the right size, shape and configuation but the tilt-sensors and couple buttons are just a plus to be added to future projects.
Now here's the question:
What is the smallest off-the-shelf Arduino board and what is the smallest Arduino-friendly FTDI board? I would assume the former would be the RBBB --I am in the market for a link to the cheapest ones people have found. And I would also assume the smallest FTDI is the cord that looks like a standard USB cable but has a 6-pin female header strip on the other. Are these thoughts correct? I welcome any input here. The end goal is to get the arduino and ftdi inside the nunchuk remote with just a standard USB cable coming out the tail. --Now tell me that would not be awesome? --A stand-alone USB nunchuck remote plugged into your lappy--what could be cooler than that?
Thanks for everyone's help on everything so far.