Joystick to keyboard/mouse mapping for KDE, GSoC idea

[Sebastian Cardenas]

Best regards,

First of all, sorry for cross-posting, but the mail is important for both lists.

My name is Juan Sebastian Cardenas and I'm very interested in
participating whit KDE in the GSoC 2010. I want to propose a proyect
called "Joystick to keyboard/mouse mapping for KDE".

First, a short intruction of mysefl. I am currently a student of 10th
semester of Systems Engineering at the Industrial University of
Santander (UIS)[1] in Bucaramanga[2], Colombia. Throughout my career I
have gained a strong knowledge in engineering, obtaining skills in
C/C++, PHP, Octave, Python, MySQL, among other technologies. I'm a
user of GNU/Linux since 2004 and co-founder of the Free Software
Community of my university, Cusol UIS[3] in 2006, community who is
renowned in the country and which has organized a series of activities
aimed to spreading the free software and the philosophy behind it.

Synopsis of the proyect: Currently on the free operating systems there
is no a "modern program" that has the ability to emulate the keyboard
and mouse with a joystick or gamepad, the objective of this project is
to provide the user a friendly and simple way to use a joystick in
games that does not support it. This program would be a KDE's
systemsettings module. Systemsetting currently has a module that
allows calibrating Joysticks. For my project I would begin to work on
the base provided by the existing module, adding the necessary
features.

Among the main features of the proposed module, is the keyboard and
mouse emulation via a joystick (obviously), the ability to save and
load different profiles, it must support different types of
controllers and multiple controllers simultaneously.

I now know about three programs that try to do what I propose. The
first is joy2key [4], which is command line based and its latest
version was released in 2008. Rejoystick [5] is written in GTK and the
last version was released in 2008.  The only application currently
under development is QJoyPad [6], that is developed in QT but is not
integrated with KDE, does not use Kdelibs or follow the KDE User
Interface Guidelines.  Its code could be used as a base to develop the
module that I propose.

This is a brief outline of my idea for GSOC 2010, I'd like to know the
opinion that have some of the KDE developers, and where possible, you
developers bring me any information they consider relevant to take
into account at the time of writing my proposal.

I would also like to know who could be my mentor if the proposal
becomes accepted.

Thank you very much, I hope your answer.

[1] http://www.uis.edu.co
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucaramanga
[3] http://www.linux.com.co/cusol
[4] http://joy2key.sourceforge.net/
[5] http://rejoystick.sourceforge.net/
[6] http://qjoypad.sourceforge.net/