Keyboard Control of Ardusub

I am planning to use the BlueROV2 Main tube as the brains of a towed camera system. We will be creating a custom mounting assembly underneath a Boston Engineering depressor wing for working in 100+m ranges.
The main electronics stack will be used as-is (minus the ESCs) and will be used to interface with sensors, camera and lights.
Being as the amount of control needed is minimal, I would like to control the full system with keyboard commands rather than a Joystick controller. Is this possible?
I have found the virtual joystick, but so far have not been able to get it to tilt the camera or turn on the lights.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

This is not possible at the moment. I hope to support it in the future, but have not had the time to address it yet.

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Thank you for the quick response.
Wired controller on its way…

You can give vJoy a try: http://vjoystick.sourceforge.net/site/

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Thanks.
I did get it installed, QGC recognizes it. I can now at least move the camera with it.
In its base configuration it is a bit quirky, I need to see if I can remap keyboard keys to it, instead of their small GUI.

Hi Ryan,
Did you get any further with this? Any other apps you found useful?

I never did pursue it much further. We just purchased a controller. It was minimal cost, and we were short on time.
Sorry, I cant help.

Hi Jacob,

I stumbled onto this thread while trying unsuccessfully to find the instructions for doing keyboard input into QGC (thinking it MUST be here, but I must be looking in the wrong places!). Do I understand this thread correctly, that there is currently no way to use the keyboard of the laptop running QGC to enter even one-letter commands and have MAVLink carry them to the Companion Pi?

If so, you mentioned adding support for it later but not having time at that time – did that ever happen? We all understand that you must have a ton on your regular BR plate, but how about pointing the way to the BR / QGC community to write something (PyMAVLink or some kind of python script?) that provides at least some basic functionality even if it’s not ready for prime time and has disclaimers slapped all over it? I’d take a stab at it and I’m sure a ton of better programmers than me would rush in to help with something so desirable (and they’d do a great job making it solid, robust, and compliant with your standards). If you 've already got joysticks and mice, how hard can that be? Thanks!

There is currently no support for this. The relevant issue to track the status of this is here: Sub: Rework joystick input and pilot input in general · Issue #9808 · ArduPilot/ardupilot · GitHub

If you 've already got joysticks and mice, how hard can that be?

It may seem straightforward to implement, and it can be, but what takes time is getting every developer involved to agree on something that will work for everyone.

Maybe not the target solution, but I have achieved to pilot ArduSub simulator with QGC using “wejoy” virtual joystick.
I have documented procedure here :

It works great !

ehughwilliams

Hello,

I have being trying for the past few weeks to implement Keyboard Controls for ArduSub in QGroundControl with very little success so far. I am unable to use the wejoy/vjoy (Virtual Joystick Driver) option as this not compatible with the system I am using.

Could you point me in the right direction?
How would you go about adding the code into QGC?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!