I-Pac Arcade Controller
For our technology demonstration the idea was for us to learn a technology and be able to demonstrate it in class. Given that all of the "cool" technologies were selected when I chose my technology, I was left with a fairly mundane and fairly straightforward arcade joystick assembly-like the one pictured to the left.

The I-PAC Arcade Controller is a USB keyboard emulator that makes it easy to capture input from switches, arcade buttons, joysticks, etc. A WIN32 firmware programmer lets one map input ports to standard keyboard keys.

The actual programming of this technology was very simple. The only real hardware is a micro switch. A switch was located at the base of each of the two buttons I was given and a four switches-on fir each direction-was found on the bottom of the joystick I was given.


Wiring the USB emulator consisted of screwing wires into labeled slots on the chip and grounding the other side of the switch-probably a total of 7 minutes of work. After downloading the software and plunging the chip in, there was an option to view an interactive image of a standard QWERTY-keyboard presented on the screen. A user need only click the icons associated with switches that connected to the emulator and map them to specific keys on the keyboard

After saving these setting. The chip is programmed and the joystick can be used the same way any other input device on the computer might be used. With only the two buttons the only obvious application of this device was to map the joystick to the directional buttons and the two button to "Enter" and "Backspace" respectively. This technology performed very reliably, despite the fact that the wiring was done with pliers and electrical tape instead of solder.