Progress Review: Controller for Art of Rally

 For this project, I was told my ideas for controllers were fine. but they didn't seem to connect too well to the conceptually, so I went back to the drawing board. I decided to look at the game another way: originally, I was going to create a controller that simulated some aspect of real-life rally racing, but then I decided to look at it in the way of toy cars all racing on a course. On that line of thinking, I was remembering all the RC cars I used to play with when I was a kid, that worked on radio controllers and had sticks for turning and steering. Usually, you would need both hands for the controller, but what if you only had to use the one? I decided on making a controller that used the accelerometer for turning and a knob attached to a potentiometer to control acceleration and braking. I may switch this around in the future depending on how intuitive this setup is, but I'm hoping this becomes the best motion-controlled, one-handed toy rally car controller.

Pseudo Code

// Load CPE library files
if (motionSensor is tilting left)
{
    press A;
}

if (motionSensor is tilting right)
{
    press D;
}

pot = analogRead(A1);

// 512 is half of 1024,  turning to the left brakes, turning to the right accelerates

if (pot < 512)
{
    press S;
}
else if (pot > 512)
{
    press W;
}

Video

Controller Sketch

Schematic

Questions:

1. Is using the accelerometer for turning and the potentiometer for acceleration intuitive enough as is? Or should I switch it around?

2. Is this controller in general more intuitive than the other controllers I wrote about for the blog post (found here) or is it not? Why or why not?