Re: [Paparazzi-devel] Using Joystick via telemetry to control the UAV

[Martin Mueller]

Hi,

>  I am currently working on implementing our Joystick controller on 
> our UAVs. I have been reading some materials and have some clues 
> about it. But there are still some confusions and questions regarding 
> using USB Joystick via telemetry to control the plane. 

one reason why the usage of "joystick" is not published/usable is that we leave 
the safe path of a separated RC channel/frequency with this. It is more like a 
proof of concept but works. There is work in progress to make it more usable.

On the aircraft side the usage of sw/airborne/joystick.c is depreciated, it was 
only used as a first test for auto1. There is code in 
sw/airborne/ppm_telemetry.c that replaces the hw ppm decoding. See 
conf/airframes/miniwing.xml for an example of how to use it. It was only used 
with a very small and light (weight: 100g) aircraft and quadcopters in auto1 
for testing with an XBee pro 2.4GHz modem.

The ground station sw is in sw/logalizer/ctrlstick.c. This code needs some 
clean up. The joystick axis have to be hardcoded and the program needs proper 
rights to access the /dev/input devices. ENAC works on getting a cleaner 
interface with sw/ground_segment/joystick/

Martin