Blackberry Joystick / Navigation Key Hack

General project help for Adafruit customers

Moderators: adafruit_support_bill, adafruit

Please be positive and constructive with your questions and comments.
Locked
User avatar
PlastiBots
 
Posts: 120
Joined: Fri Mar 25, 2011 7:12 pm

Blackberry Joystick / Navigation Key Hack

Post by PlastiBots »

Looking to use a Blackberry Navigation Key / Joystick as a mouse input device tied to USB. Anyone figured out the pinouts and/or signal protocols of this thing? reference: http://www.dealextreme.com/p/genuine-re ... 9800-81000

Image

User avatar
PlastiBots
 
Posts: 120
Joined: Fri Mar 25, 2011 7:12 pm

Re: Blackberry Joystick / Navigation Key Hack

Post by PlastiBots »

Just to add to the above.. I was hoping that there may be a way to interface this to an Arduino. The idea being BB Navigation key >> Arduino w/USB >> to Laptop. The overall goal is to simply get it to scroll vertically (up and dn). My thoughts on the unit are that it will likely not output processed data, but raw data. What I need to figure out is what all the pins do and what are the outputs.

Any thoughts?

User avatar
dr. au-fait
 
Posts: 73
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2011 6:17 pm

Re: Blackberry Joystick / Navigation Key Hack

Post by dr. au-fait »

At that price, why not sacrifice one for the cause and tear into it for a closer look and maybe some macro photography? The possibilities are endless. It could be "smart" in which case it's probably I2C or SPI, or it's just a raw sensor output that gets amplified and processed elsewhere on the mainboard.

Still, it seems like there should be some data posted on that critter by now. What little searching I did turned up nothing as well.

User avatar
PlastiBots
 
Posts: 120
Joined: Fri Mar 25, 2011 7:12 pm

Re: Blackberry Joystick / Navigation Key Hack

Post by PlastiBots »

Yup.. That is exactly my plan. I have 2 coming from DX. The first will be torn apart to see how it ticks... My guess is some of the pins are used to power a IR LED (possibly) and others return some result via 1 or 2 IR receivers. The hope is that I can figure this out, throw them to the Arduino as inputs, read the results and, with fingers crossed, determine if there some consistency when scrolling with a finger over the sensor.. If the gods are on my side, then I would just need to figure out how to translate all that and output it via USB to be interpreted as a scroll wheel from a mouse. A tall order. I also have an Apple Mighty Mouse that I am hoping that I may be able to interface the BB trackpad to the input from the MM trackball. My backup is to use the trackball as I did here (http://www.plastibots.com/?p=37), but I want to try to go with something without moving parts (even though the MM trackball worked flawlessly for over a year and I think is still going strong (the 901 has since been sold)).

vahakn
 
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 7:36 am

Re: Blackberry Joystick / Navigation Key Hack

Post by vahakn »

Hi there
has anyone managed to get this puppy working?
Id like to try one to use as a tongue controller for paraplegics
would love some further help and info

thanks

Locked
Please be positive and constructive with your questions and comments.

Return to “General Project help”