230 replies to this topic

[CyBerkut]

Actually Loc Nar, there was another emulator that you may have been thinking of. Mental Patient posted one up:

http://www.deinmeister.de/jmt_e.htm
http://www.deinmeister.de/joymse_e.htm

I think Joy2Mouse has more flexibility, but I haven't really played around with either one yet. BTW, that Joy2Mouse was posted up by somebody else in these forums, I believe. I can't remember who.

Foust, you keep coming up with interesting projects. Good luck with the latest!

[Foust]

CyBerkut, on 18 May 2013 - 10:47 AM, said:

Foust, you keep coming up with interesting projects. Good luck with the latest!

Thanks. It is worth mentioning that most of these projects are the result of me being to cheap to go buy new hardware. If I added up the time involved I would have been further ahead to just buy a TM warthog and went from there.

Not much fun in that though.

*EDIT*
Probably not new, but I just found out that you can get just the warthog stick. It is still stupid expensive ($300)

Edited by Foust, 20 May 2013 - 04:11 PM.

[Foust]

Loc Nar, on 16 May 2013 - 04:21 PM, said:

Either way, BUMP!!

You and your controls discussions, I can not stop thinking about it.

Rotation on the stick. For considerations of natural motion relative to the motion on the screen, I get it. In practice, do you find the twist to the right uncomfortable? That is partly where I got hung up. I imagine there there is a component to its physical position in the pit to.

I'm revisiting the idea again because of your well thought out prose on the topic, and because I found a gimbal design that I'm going to try to work the idea of friction joints into.

Somehow I also stumbled into magnetic angular position sensors. 1 chip, 1 magnet, 2 axis....

[Loc Nar]

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Probably not new, but I just found out that you can get just the warthog stick. It is still stupid expensive ($300)

The standalone Warty stick represents the worst value of all directions you can spend on MWO. All you get is the stick, and the throttle is eminently more useful. The Warty is way too awesome on it's own to chop up so is relegated to being a first-order joystick making a Cougar is much more suitable for hacking with ($175 for one with a blown gimbal on ebay right now). The price for the new standalone Warty (guy I just tried to get set up paid $352 after shipping) would be better put towards a used on with the throttle, but in the end the Warty is as much a liability as any other first-order joystick. I actually just bought a Warthog on ebay (on it's way) for Star Citizen, where my fancy mech stick would be as much a liability as a regular first-order stick is with MWO. For my pit in SC mode, the Warty goes center and my mech stick is removed and the mouse/pad flipped forward, giving me 6DoF + proper FPS controls without any awkward procedures to transition from flight to boarding, but naturally I have some more ideas to incorporate as I move forward. I also wrote up a SC version of my controls article, waiting approval/publication on qqmercs where my MWO version is already.

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do you find the twist to the right uncomfortable?

Heh, actually it's the twist to the left that can get goofy feeling if I go too far. My stick has no stops, so the only thing limiting my twist range is my wrists, since the pots can pick up 180deg although ony maybe the middle 160deg is linear. That and wires will get twisted off. With TARGET, I set the physical range on my stick each time I plug it in, by moving it to the maximum travel limits I feel like using, which is ~90deg. Because I find it easier to turn right than left, the nuetral position of my stick is not straight ahead, but slightly to the right, allowing me a little more range of comfortable left without affecting the right travel.

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Somehow I also stumbled into magnetic angular position sensors. 1 chip, 1 magnet, 2 axis....

I have yet to find an application I can use one of these in any of my cockpit projects, and for me so far is one of the biggest limitations of the Thustmaster T16000M -the x/y sensor is one of those single chip/dual axis things you can check out here: What makes it useless to me is that the MLX90333 (same sensor as in the Warthog BTW) uses 5 wires and is not normal pot wiring, but instead relies on voodoo logic commands to generate it's outputs and makes it essentially unhackable. 5v, gnd, and 3(!) logic wires communicating with that chip, which is then crunched into x/y.

This is fine if you want to use the sensor as is, but that rules out the gimbal I made, as well as the gimbal I wanted to make with the one I bought for my sailplane cockpit project. Both gimbals require discrete pots since they are not on the same plane. There's no hope of adapting it to the sailplane gimbal since the two axes are 50mm offset at their pivots, but a clever arrangement of this sensor located fore/aft of a mech gimbal *could be made to work, but the amount of mechanical complication to get it where it needs to be and then adjusted to useful range etc makes it more complicated than just using 2 regular pots/Halls, and the compactness would make it really hard to incorporate any kind of friction joints as well. Were it not for that detail, the T16000M would be very much more useful... I really wish TM just made a DIY board that was TARGET capable.

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I'm revisiting the idea again because of your well thought out prose on the topic, and because I found a gimbal design that I'm going to try to work the idea of friction joints into.

Thanks for the kind words, I hope any of the information proves to be useful. What gimbal have you decided to have a go at modding? I mentioned it before but I'm not sure I communicated clearly, but that FF stick you have, geared FF motors act very much like a friction joint when the motors are not powered. This generally requires the wires to the motors to be severed , but leaving the rest of the stick in tact. If that's a working stick, you should really try it out since it's a quick experiment and with the emulators above you even would be able to use absolute inputs and independently adjust the x/y sensitivities.

Some FF mechanisms get slop in them, but some stay pretty tight. Another easy way to achieve a similar damping on the axis would be using an RC servo, also not hooked up to anything but rather just using it's gearing to damp movement. It's like a mechanical version of those viscous dampers I have, which luckily so far have not proved necessary once I rebuilt my stick last time, removing the tiny amount of slop in the x-axis joint and using lithium grease on the rubs when reassembling.

[Grits N Gravy]

I like your articles. I think a simpler message that you're getting at is, a joystick is a best for controlling the rate of change, while a mouse is best for pointing. IE if our primary concern is to control how fast the mech rotated and pitched a joystick is a better device for that application. Though if we want to point to a specific place on the screen (ie aim using the reticule) the mouse is a superior control device. Mice are pointing devices, joysticks are basically throttles which function on two axis. In MWO and most shooters our primary concern is to control the direction we're pointing, not how fast we're spinning to point.

For pointing applications pointing devices will work best, Ie mice, touchpads, touchscreens, digital pens, stylus and tablets. If you primary concern is controlling rate of change a joystick and throttle are great of that application.

[Loc Nar]

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I like your articles. I think a simpler message that you're getting at is, a joystick is a best for controlling the rate of change, while a mouse is best for pointing.

Thanks Grits, I don't like contributing to thread drift (especially in people's cockpit project threads!), so I posted my actual reply to your post here in a thread I started juuuust for this conversation.

o7

[Benjamin Davion]

Let me just say that for the majority of my childhood adult life ENTIRE EXISTENCE my #1 dream was owning a true-life Battlemech simulator. Moving around, dumping heat into the thing, working cooling vest, etc. Maybe not a real neurohelmet. BUT CLOSE ENOUGH. Even at this level of development.. you, sir, are a saint.

[Foust]

Coming Soon™ to a forum near you

-Mech Pit rev3
-T16000m Friction gimbal Hotas + Analog rudders
-Fully functional panels

As a teaser

[Loc Nar]

Awesome! Looks and sounds like significant progress, can't wait to see this and hear more about it.

[Foust]

Oh wow a whole subforum. Guess I should get with that update....

[Gevurah]

Bout time, been asking for this for months Still pretty cool though. Hoping they start moving stuff based off the summary thread so we can all get consolidated here.