One of the steps of building the hardware and software solution is to learn how to drive the IC you want to use from an Arduino. The first piece I worked on was the MCP41010 digital potentiometer.

When learning to use a new chip with Arduino I take two approaches in parallel. I download the datasheet and read through it and I search for a tutorial to see what someone else has done.

In this case the tutorial ended up being the most fruitful, someone else has already interfaced the circuit with the Arduino and written sample code. I used the article “MCP41010 Digital Potentiometer Arduino User Manual”.

At this point I have just connected the chip according to the diagram in the article and run the software example from the article but it seeing the voltages range from near 0V to near 5V lets me know that the voltage divider works and I can replicate one axis of a coco joystick.

My next step is to connect a second MCP41010 and see if I can drive them together allowing me to simulate both axis at once.