ShuttleXpress by Contourdesign.com to Control Tiller Wheel

[Cowhorns32]

Dear Peter,

I have been using your products for years now and appreciate all that you have done and do for the Flight Simulator Community.  The Dash-8 Q400  has had me looking for a usb tiller control option for quite some time now.  Unable to find an adequate controller I've turned to other options that may suffice.  Since I also do a lot of photography editing on Lightroom I came across the ShuttleXpress by Contour Designs.  I picked one up and the shuttle wheel replicates the movements of the tiller.  Unfortunately the device does not show up as a game controller but only a USB controller in Windows.  

I have downloaded the driver software and plan to play around with it even though Prepar 3d or gaming in general is not currently supported.  I have also contacted Contour Designs and informed them of what I am trying to do since they have a post for requested applications.  For less than $60 I think that this may be a decent option for simmers looking to have a separate controller for the Tiller on certain aircraft.  

Are there any easy ways to assign usb devices as controllers?  Are there any USB tiller options that I am not finding on my numerous web searches that other simmers are using that can easily be assigned in FSUIPC?  Any help or information that you may have would be greatly appreciated.  

Thanks again for the creation and continue support of your amazing products.

Sincerely,

Mark R. Holmes.

 

[Pete Dowson]

4 minutes ago, Cowhorns32 said:

Are there any easy ways to assign usb devices as controllers?  Are there any USB tiller options that I am not finding on my numerous web searches that other simmers are using that can easily be assigned in FSUIPC?

FSUIPC natively only supports these controller input types:

1. Regular controllers recognised by Windows as game controllers, or "joysticks".
2. PFC serial port axes, through my PFC driver modules
3. GoFlight switches and controls through their GFDev.DLL.

Input (and output for that matter) from any HID (Human Interface Device) type USB connection can be supported through the use of Lua plugins using the com library. It has functions dedicated to HID facilities useful for these things.You'd need to program your own plug-in script to handle the inputs and send them on to FS via the ipc.control function, or maybe writing to FSUIPC offsets for more options.

There is an example script supplied in your FSUIPC Documents sub-folder, in the Example Lua plugins ZIP file. It is called HidDemo.lua. It handles joysticks types -- which could really also be used directly, in the main part, though it could do a lot more.the Windows joystick API FSUIPC uses is limited to 6 axes and 32 buttons per device. This script could be adapted more many more.

If your device looks petty much like a joystick in the ways understood by the assorted HID dedicated functions in the com library then it shouldn't be too hard to adapt this script. However, if they don't work then it may come down to a more basic level -- actually reading the raw data using the ordinary com.read type functions and trying to decode that. I've done this for a number of hardware units in my cockpit, including the CockpitSonic overhead.

There's a program called HIDscanner available in the Download Links subforum thread about useful additional programs. The log that produces should show whether it will be easy or hard!

There's no universal solution because outside of the Microsoft joystick specific mechanism USB devices can do almost whatever they like, with a driver normally supplied by the makers.  Apart from joysticks there are other standard types like keyboards, mice and webcams, but there's no standard treatment for all control input types.

Pete