Well, now that we had covered the bases and we can actually “talk” with the hardware, it’s time to start designing the User experience. Or in other terms, I want to go from a “joystick” to a “product”.
in this post I’ll try and go over some of my ideas and howto overcome some of the difficulties involved.
This would be a short one, I’m writing these posts as I have some time, however, they are usually in a month or two delay behind the real timeline. sometimes it matters, usually it does not 🙂
In this matter it does. When I made my order for the FCC3, I’ve asked WhiteEagle some questions regarding the device, stating I’m going to build a controller for it and write my own custom firmware.
It turned out, that WhiteEagle was himself working on a similar project, he however focused on the hardware side deciding to use “off the self” firmware based on MMJOY2. We have decided that I’ll write my code to work on his hardware design, which over the process, evolved a bit to accommodate for my shenanigans (12 bit ADC) and his awesome ideas (like a centering assist LEDs).
As some of you may have seen WhiteEagle’s posts on ViperPits or on his own site, Vipercore. The firmware side is almost done, we still need to clean up some issues that may (or may not) exist.
In addition, I used this opportunity to go completely bananas on this one and took the HID protocol beyond anything I ever done to provide the best out of the Box experience I could do, allowing a trouble free experience once you have calibrated the hardware correctly.
However, For now I’ve yet to install the FCC in my pit, I’ve developed the hardware using my cougar with WhiteEagle providing real FCC3 tests and feedback. I hope that in the coming month I’ll be able to build a stick base, so the stick could be properly mounted.
FCC3 is basically there to get us as close as possible to the F-16 Stick. But it was always restricted by what the Cougar electronics allows you to do. I could build an equivalent and take it up a notch by giving a little bit more on the HW side. We’ve decided to start by addressing the much sought out buzz word “resolution”…
you might have heard about joysticks with “14 bit resolution” or “8 bit resolution”. in this post I’ll try to explain a bit about this and how does it affect us.