Joystick calibration

Question

Hi there, I'm Martin from Heli-KIt, helicopter controls for simulators like yours.  But from some time ago my clients are reporting troubles calibrating their controls in X-Plane versions 10 and 11.  Red bars never go green or blue.

If you calibrate Heli-Kit joystick in Windows control panel, and then test it, it shows full travel in all axis.  But when using X-Plane, it never detects full motion.  I noticed that manual of version 11 says that this is a hardware failure, but in fact it is not. Something was changed in X-Plane joystick calibration module.

Is there some way to calibrate and use a joystick like X-Plane older versions? Maybe defining some "heli-kit.joy" or something like?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

If you get an answer please post it for all the comunity!.. I have some issues to with my custom joysticks.. Good luck!

Comments

Sure I will! By the moment, it is a big headache.

Answer 2

Yes, I think the .joy file might be the solution. See this article for how to define the .joy file. I think the part that will be particularly helpful in this situation is:

# Optional: Specify relaxed calibration rules for this device.
# This is useful if your USB hardware reports a wider range of axis motion than
# the device is actually capable of sending. (For instance, if you're a custom cockpit
# builder, and your axis reports 16 bits of travel, but you only use 10 bits.)
# This is *not* recommended if you have off-the-shelf hardware from a
# consumer hardware company like Saitek, Logitech, Thrustmaster, CH Products, etc.
Calibration: Relaxed

Don't forget you can send in the config files to us to include in a later update so more people can benefit from the work you put in!

Comments

Hi jroberts,

Thank you for your answer. I replied a few days ago and was waiting for your reply, but I cannot find what I wrote. A mystery... Here I go again.

I tried 

################################################################
# NOTE: 
# You almost certainly don't need to know the syntax for the
# assignments section, because you should be auto-generating
# it from an actual configuration (by hitting the 
# "Save as Default for [Device]" button in Settings > Joystick).
################################################################

"Save as Default for Heli-KIT", but never found any Heli-KIT.joy file in my whole computer. But next time I started up X-Plane, looks like in some way program remember what I did with assignments.  Where is supposed to be located the new .joy file?

In the LOG file there are traces of new joystick definition, but nothing that I can modify for testing.

Up to X-Plane v10, no problem at all with joystick calibration. But with 11 is a headache.

Why not keeping things simple? Are you planning to put the older calibration module in newer X-Plane versions?

Frank to say, generating a dubious .joy file does not seem to be a good solution.

Every week more customers are requesting me a solution for this issue.

Thanks for your help!

Regards,

Martin

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By default, saving a .joy file will place int in the resources > joystick configs folder.