Currently building an rc car with wireless control. My question is, is it possible to send the output of a joystick through a transmitter to a receiver?
The joystick is on the remote controller, and is one of those little hobby ones with two potentiometers for each x and y. I want to send the output of the joystick over the transmitter to the receiver which will go into the arduino, where I can do motor control based on the joysticks values (eg. Only half pushed forward, motor speed is only half of full speed). I'm just unsure of how to implement the joystick in a circuit on the controller. Any advice appreciated.
What wireless do you have? Normally you have to have some sort of processor at the transmitt end to gather the information from the joystick and package it up for transmission.
This can be another Arduino or an ATtiny or it can be part of your transmitter like a wi-if chip.
You don't send analog. You send numeric values not vulnerable to signal loss/distortion that allow you to use one channel for all needs.
The controller in the car reads the channel and 'decides' what to do with the car hardware.
For example if the steering is done by servo, the controller would use PWM to steer and likely the values passed would be 0 to 255 allowing fraction of a degree turn control.
You could use two nRF24L01+ modules to act as the wireless link Of course this needs an Arduino (or at least an Atmega 328 chip) at each end.
The pair of programs in this link have been derived from a model train control system that sends a potentiometer value for speed and direction control. It would be easy to send the two potentiometer values from a joystick.
I got my nRF24s working with this Tutorial. IIRC that demo is based on a joystick.