Mistral

Concept

Taking its name from the light yet powerful winds that guide the French sails in the Southern seas, the floating Mistral will steer you to virtual horizons. A base-independent joystick, accessible and affordable to all, the Mistral is a simple and versatile wireless controller. We built it in less than 24 hours.

How it's built

Device-side We programmed a Texas Instruments MSP430 (in C/C++) to orchestrate all the device functions: Reading from the SPI/GPIO peripherals (gyroscope and accelerometer), pose and movement estimation, driving the output peripherals (Bluetooth Transceiver), and servicing various interrupts. We minimize energy consumption by the microprocessor by detecting operating modes: {standby, low-power, idle} and switching dynamically to the appropriate power-saving level, shutting down idle peripherals when needed, and servicing only high-priority interrupts. The hardware is entirely battery powered, and costs less than 8USD in components. It is all held together on a tiny breadboard.

Host-side: The "Driver" On the host side, we used Java to program a "driver": In essence, it reads inputs from the Bluetooth COM port, and then translates this into keyboard and mouse input.

Host-side: The Application We quickly created a 3D video game(in Blender & Unity3D using JS) consisting in an airplane flying through loops and collecting points. The video game was made to showcase the capability of the joystick.

Built With

• blender
• bluetooth
• c/c++
• gyroscope
• java
• javascript
• jssc-api
• msp430
• unity