Although I’m slowly working my way through the Design your own console ebook, theres a lot to learn, so I took a bit of a break last night and took a more hands on approach.
I built a very simple LED circuit and connected it to the XGS via the expansion port. That was the easy part, I then spent the next hour or two reading about the SX52 in order to program it to blink the LED on and off. It might not sound much, but considering I know very little about electronics and have never programmed the SX52 before, I’m pretty chuffed. In fact I’d rate the blinking LED achievment along the same lines as seeing your first triangle rendered via openGL, it doesn’t appear to do much but there was a lot of background work involved in getting that far 
The XGS includes a lot of source code for a number of different hardware and software projects which I’m going to work through, although I prefer to try my own methods from scratch first. That way I can see just how far I can get from my own knowledge before getting stuck and having to refer to the working examples for hints/help.
So with that said, tonights challenge is to get the Joystick to light up an LED when you moved it in a specific direction. The circuit is about as simple as it gets, an LED, a resistor and a logic gate. Now I just need to find out how to talk to the joystick via the SX52.
Once I’ve built a more interesting circuit I’ll post up some screenshots. Although until I learn more about the overall hardware in the XGS the screenshots won’t be all that impressive 
