Click here for documentation and lab report
Project using WaveShare MPU-9255 10-DOF IMU Sensor mounted in a Vintage flight joystick handle housing to move objects in Blender. I am unsure on the exact model of the joystick; I bought mine from EBay. Any two-button joystick should work for this.
Needs SDA, SCL (i2c communication for MPU-9255), 2 GPIO pins for joystick buttons, VCC (3-5v), and Ground.
Project is run via as an addon for Blender 2.7.9, which is the highest version that will run a Raspberry Pi without modifications. An ethernet cable is used for wiring, and plugs into breadboard attached via Wedge to A Raspberry Pi 3.
On Raspberry Pi, should be able to run sudo apt-get install blender to install blender
There may be ways to run 2.8 or higher on Rpi, and it's likely this addon will still work, but have not tested it.
Copy the folder joystick_control to /user/share/blender/scripts/addons
Blender runs its own version of Python. That means that it may not have access to certain libs this program needs out of the box. If that's the case, you have to add them manually. That means going into your python folder and copying the RPi.GPIO lib and possibly smbus over to the Blender/2.79/scripts/modules directory.
Or you can create a virtual environment (haven't tried)
virtualenv -p python3 venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip3 install smbus
cp -r venv/lib/python3.5/site-packages/smbus/ ~.config/blender/2.7.9/scripts/modules
Found in user preferences > addons > Object: Motion Sensor Joystick Controls. Check box to activate.
Spacebar to bring up commands. Search Open Joystick Menu and run it.
Pressing the top button on the joystick allows tilting joystick to move camera angle. Pressing trigger moves joystick forward.
This article by Joshua Hrisko was indispensible to this project