On 12/04/2008, mike clemow
I have one of those tilt-sensing joysticks... honestly, they're pretty bad. I've had a lot more luck building out my own hardware with an arduino and a proper accelerometer. it's a tad more pricey than the cheap joysticks, but you have the added benefit of reusing the parts to build all kinds of interfaces to chuck. I also have some Python code that reads from the serial bus and sends out OSC messages to chuck (or anything, really). Plus hardware hacking is so fun...
Yeah, the "real" ones are much better and the Arduino is appealing. I'll probably get into it later this year, I can get a Arduino through the group-discount of a friend of mine who's studying arts&technology so that's too good to pass up. I hope we'll get a serial interface in ChucK anyway because I want to use it to add leds to my sequencing joystick. Still, there are reasons for using ready-made joypads. I'm 30 and like many in my generation I grew up gaming, starting with the Nintendo 8bit and never saw a reason to give it up. So; I'm very familiar with joypads and being intimately familiar with the exact layout of your instrument is a huge advantage. I mean... if you look at how many hours a concert musician has to spend with his instrument, then compare that to how many hours many of us have spend with joypads&sticks.... It also means I can confidently promise my band-mate I'll have my "lead-joypad" instrument done in less then a week, there's something to be said for that. :¬). I may get back to you on your generous offer but for now I'm quite happy with my little interpolation optimisation trick. Last night I found that optimisation in this stuff can make a huge difference; for example the joy-fm example that comes with ChucK draws a LOT of cpu when you start moving the sticks a lot. HID can generate a lot of data once you get into moving the axis about and optimisation means the buffer and so the latency can go down. That's a big deal to me. Also; Algromanta; if I were you I'd just buy a ready-made sensor. They are expensive as far as sensors go but here it would save a lot of time. Yours, Kas.