I have designed and built a joystick that contains no electronic parts -- only fiberoptics. The motion is sensed via quadrature encoding, and the signal processing is handled by an arduino microcontroller. How to terminate fiberoptics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OosMQHQlY40 http://benkrasnow.blogspot.com/2010/12/fiberoptic-joystick-with-quadrature.html http://benkrasnow.blogspot.com/2010/02/linear-position-tracking-with.html