how to make a joystick with labview to control the speed and directions of two dc motors

[sprksc]

hi! I have a dc motor drive project. I set up two circuits. one of them is a driver circuit and other one is a remote control circuit. I used PIC16F877A as a microcontroller for each circuits. I also used ARX(receiver) and ATX(transmitter). On the transmitter circuit, I am using a voltage devider with 1kohm POT to control the speed of the motors and i have also 4 reset buttons to control the directions of the motors. Now, i want to control both the speed and directions of motors with a keyboard, instead of POT and reset buttons. Can anyone help me about how i can make this with labview.     

[OliviaC]

Hi sprksc,

Are you looking to have the program downloaded onto the microcontroller or were you looking to have the program running off of a computer to control the motors?

[sprksc]

I want to control the speed and directions of motors by a keyboard or a joystick. I mean when I push a button on the keyboard, it will send a signal to microcontroller and then it will send the signal to the motors. for example the reset buttons on my circuit provide high or low voltage to microcontroller. by these buttons, i control the motors to turn right or left. in addition to this, A voltage devider with 1kohm POT provides the speed control of motors. when the resistance of POT is 0, the voltage sent to the microcontroller will be 5V. If i increase the resistance of POT, the voltage sent to microcontroller will decrease. therefore, the speed of motor is controlled with the change of the resistance of the POT. However, this methods are an analog method. I want to control all of these processes by digitally with labview.      

[OliviaC]

Hi sprksc,

If you are looking to deploy this code onto your microprocessor, you will not be able to do that with the type of microprocessor that you are using. However, if you are looking to have the LabVIEW code running on your computer and communicating to the microprocessor, you will have to do this via serial. You'll want your code to have an event structure that monitors for a key press and then based on which key is pressed, you will send a serial command using the NI VISA VI's to the processor.