Test controllers without Robot?[JAVA]

FIRST General Forum
1

Hey guys, Okay so I know this has been answered before but I need an answer specifically for java.

I have smart dashboard and no robot in front of me. How can I test for the joystick axis?

I am using a six(well seven)axis PS3 Controller and wanna get it to work like without using any code on the robot… any help???

Btw, I can’t use Windows Game Controller properties because it doesn’t really give me the raw axis-es and I can’t really use the default ones because I’ve edited them for reasons… Help?

2

If you have the DS installed (or have the LV runtime for some other reason) you can use this:
http://firstforge.wpi.edu/sf/frs/do/listReleases/projects.wpilib/frs.joystick_explorer

3

Woah thanks man :slight_smile: (or lady, I won’t judge by name :P) This only goes to 6 axis max… I’ll try to see if I can manually reprogram and re-enable them, THANKS :smiley:

4

Perhaps MotioninJoy can be of some help?

I use it for my PS3 controller to play games on my computer.

5

The driver station only reads 6 axes. If you want the 7th axis, you need to use a remapping program and get rid of one of the other axes.

6

I’ve never really explored how the drivers’ station works, but if you are writing your own remapping software then you could do something funny like multiplex the bits of multiple axes together and then de-multiplex them on the other side.

So for example, if each axis is normally 16 bits you could make your remapper program squeeze two in if you allocated 8 bits to each.

On computer:


uint16_t axis_4_in,axis_7_in,axis_4_out;
axis_4_out=(axis_4_in&0xff00) | (axis_7_in>>8);

On robot:


uint16_t axis_4_in,axis_4_out,axis_7_out;
axis_4_out=axis_4_in&0xff00;
axis_7_out=axis_4_in<<8;

This would discard the lower eight bits, but presumably you don’t need more than 256 different positions for each axis anyway.

There may be some simpler way to do this like just opening a TCP stream or something; again, I haven’t really looked into what you can do with the drivers’ station.