Recently I have an idea to invent a new kind of input device,but don't know what to do.Anyone can give some advice?

For prototyping, there is a product available which presents a USB HID-standard input device to a PC, and provides several pins to which buttons and other sensors can be wired.

For more specific control/features, a good place to start is with a USB-enabled microcontroller. This will also give you a USB interface on one side, and pins to interface sensors and buttons on the other. You'll get more control of the microcontroller software, but you'll have to impliment the USB HID stack yourself; but there are almost certainly examples of how to do so on the internet. The device I mentioned previously is simply one such microcontroller on a small circuit board -- it's just been pre-flashed with some software. Its even likely that you could buy one of those, and then reprogram the firmware for any specific needs that aren't direcly supported (I believe only simple buttons are supported by defualt).

I forget the name of it off-hand, it might have been available through sparkFun. I have to run for now, but I can try find it later and post back.

For production, large runs of ASICs are cheaper, but Microcontrollers are common in production products. The WiiMote contains one, for instance.

My advice to you would be research, see what input devices are already out there, how do they work? From that see how many and what type of people actually use them and for what?

After you have established where your place in the market is going to be, build your design around that place. For example if you found that there was an opening for a simplified controller used to play simple platform games like the consoles of old, then build your product around that.

On the other hand if you already have the idea, make sure that there is an opening for it, do your research, ask people (lots of people) for there would be no joy in producing something that no body would use and would waste your time and money, unless you are doing it for the joy of it, of course.

You might want to google Controllerism, a term used to describe a group of musicians and artists who build or modify controllers. Their main interest is usually in controlling music software, but the principle is the same: create a piece of hardware, connect it to your PC, and then program software to do something useful with the controller input.


I mention these guys and gals because they should provide some great insight into how you can make a variety of different hardware structures talk to the computer....

Here's what I was talking about earlier:

Universal Human Interface Device -- U-HID