Hasi321:
Hy,I wounder if someone could help me with this one: I´m planning to build a joystick with 4 pots, 7 buttons and one POV hat (hat switch). I would like to use only one Atmega8 for the project, but I have no clue how I could communicate with my computer. One option would be to use the arduinos built in serial-to-usb chip, but I would like to only use an Atmega8. How can I do that, or is it even possible to do so?
Do you want to build a serial or USB based joystick? Serial would be relatively easy to build, you just need to add something like a MAX232 or equivalent chip to translate from the Atmega's 5V to the required +- 12V as required for serial communication. This is probably a dead end though since serial ports are quite scarce on modern computers.
You could build a USB based mouse by implementing the HID interface for a mouse using the V_USB library (http://www.obdev.at/products/vusb/index.html). An Arduino port of this library can be found at Google Code Archive - Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting.. This will be a little bit more tricky and will require some internet searching for examples to adapt. Some examples can be found at http://www.obdev.at/products/vusb/prjhid.html but are not specifically adapted to the Arduino environment.