Control a C program on a PC with external digital/analog inputs

Question

I developed a code in DEV C++ which simulates graphically a the actions of a train driver. Basically I control the speed and some other functions of a train from my keyboard.

Now, instead of the keyboard, I want to use a "home made mouse" i.e. digital/analog inputs to control the program.

Read some articles and seem quite difficult.

Can anyone help me with some advice, or point me in a few directions?

Answer 1

Modifying a keyboard/mouse/game controller is a possibility for many projects of this type.

Or you could use something like an Arduino as an analog/digital input adapter. This would connect to the PC via USB, and generally would like like a serial port to your program. Your program would just monitor the serial port for data, which could be single bytes indicating various events, several byte messages, or even human-readable newline-terminated strings. The later can make debugging a lot simpler if you don't need to move so much data that you would fill up a high speed serial pipe. For example, your data might look something like this:

airbrake 0\n
throttle 10\n
throttle 85\n
whistle 1\n
whistle 0\n

Or for firmware simplicity, it might be something like

digital 3 0\n
analog 2 10\n
analog 2 85\n
digital 4 1\n
digital 4 0\n

Leaving your PC program to map the channels to names based on knowledge of the wiring of your adapter to the physical controls