Our team has been experimenting with button boards this off-season and while designing it we were wondering if the 18 button indicators in the driver station meant that the maximum buttons allowed(per joystick) was 18. I thought I read someone asking about this but I don’t think they ever got an answer. Can anyone confirm or deny this?
32 buttons per joystick/gamepad/GenericHID is the maximum supported.
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To add to this - if you need more buttons than that (for some reason), you can sacrifice one of your axes, and treat each bit of data as a boolean, then decode it in your robot code. For example, if you’re using an Arduino with ArduinoJoystickLibrary (which seems to be the most popular library for emulating a USB joystick), each analog input supports up to 16 bits of precision. That means an extra 16 buttons for each analog input you sacrifice. Note that I haven’t tested this, so although I’d presume it would work, I don’t know if you’d have issues with it.
The DS / robot protocol only supports 8 bits of precision per axis.
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I was thinking of that as an alternative, but that should be plenty, I can’t think of any reason why you would need more than 32 buttons
If you really need a lot of buttons, you could go with a MIDI device and send the info to the robot from a dashboard or custom application, instead of using a joystick through the DS.
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Didn’t know this. I had tried googling a bit but couldn’t find much. Thank you! That’s pretty helpful to know.
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