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#11 Gamepad control
Not sure whether this is the right way to post questions and suggestions but here are my thoughts:
My joystick (T.16000M) has many different levels of pressure responds, and clearly EQMOD knows that, since during gamepad calibration, the number changes continously from 0 to 65535 when I gradually bend the stick from one direction to another.
But when I use the stick to slew the mount, seems that the slew action is only triggered when I press to somewhere like +30000 or -30000 (for convenience, assuming 0 at center), and it only does slew/no slew , and when it slew, it slew at a constant speed, instead of slewing at different speeds given different stick pressure.
In principal when I have different levels of pressures, I do not need other way to set the slew speed, the slew speed shall directly come from how much or how hard I bend the stick. In this way, the control could be much easier and more flexible.
Why I raise this: I want to track satellites with a joystick, and I want to fully utilize the capability of the hardware to make the tracking easier.
Is there anything I missed that caused me asking something that is already solved?
Cheers
Boyang
This is something we have considered, discussed and tested in the past but sadly was found not to be practical. The issue is the wide range of slew speeds the mount can have move at and the relatively small amount of deflection on a joystick. Yes the software can detect small adjustments if the joystick but that doesnt' mean that the user will be capable of operating the stick with the precision that the softeare can read it. In practice we found it was just too easy to accidentally move the stick a little to far and loose your target completely (especially if wearing gloves on a cold winters night). Typically the joystick interface is used for fine positioning or targets not for satelite tracking so what we've done is implemented a two speed option where a slight deflection will move at your "preset 1" speed whilst a full deflection will move at whatever rate you have currently selected.
Note that typically these mounts are not best suited for tracking satelites due to the "low resolution" of the very fast slew speeds - wha tI mean by that is the mount communication protocol acts to quantise the number of actual rates achievable - and any speed variation is not "continuous" so the mount will "jump" at each speed change - the mount firmware also requires that the motors are actually stopped prior to any "fast speed" change.
Chris.
Hi Chris,
Thanks you for the explanations!