I recently upgraded to the Navigator fight controller. So far it seems like it has fixed my network and camera problems, but I’m still getting it set up. One problem I’m having is that I need to hold the vertical thruster stick on my Xbox controller up a little for it to be “centered”.
I don’t have access to the ROV to double check things until this weekend, but I wanted to see if someone knows the answer to the problem so I can be ready to go as soon as possible.
The axis gain is set from the expected symmetrical -1000 to +1000 and the Xbox controller stick does show itself centered on that Cockpit controller setup screen when it is physically centered. Even when it’s set for Manual flight mode the vertical thrusters spin ‘downwards’ until I raise the Xbox stick a little (20%?) then they stop. It’s like there’s an offset on the stick in the software somehow. It’s the same for all 3 flight modes.
I got a second Xbox controller to try this weekend too to see if it’s just a controller problem.
The ROV also takes a couple minutes for the second set up beeps when powering up, but I think that’s normal for the Navigator/BlueOS?
That should already be the default in Cockpit when a Sub vehicle is connected, so I’m curious how that ended up changed for your setup. We really aught to add a warning for that though - it shouldn’t be so easy to end up with values that don’t work properly. I’ve raised an Issue for it.
I had to re-configure all of the stick axis because they were using the very strange Mode 3 controls instead of the standard Mode 2. Can they also add some text in Cockpit to say what each axis letter is on the ROV for easier setup?
Now my only issue with it is that the Z axis is reversed from what I expect. The ROV dives when I push the stick forward. I didn’t notice a way to reverse the axis and I even tried Z values of 0 to -1000, but that obviously didn’t work.
Edit: I just realized that I probably need to enter Z values of 1000-0.
Thanks! I don’t know why I didn’t think of switching the values before. A lot of the software I use requires the value on the left box being a smaller value than the right side.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to test it last weekend because our boat sank. Definitely wasn’t the shipwreck I was expecting to look at. We did get it back up with a chain hoist and 2 come-alongs, and both the boat engine and the outboard are running again. Might possibly take the boat back out to the lake this weekend.
Maybe it would also be good to have a graphic showing the ROV with arrows showing the axis and which direction is the positive direction? like the “Gnomon” that CAD programs use would be an example.
There could probably be a swap button (which just swaps the values around), to make it clearer that swapping is possible.
Oof, glad you managed to recover some criticals at least…
Hope you manage to get that weekend trip in
Hmm, I like the idea, but technically the autopilot interprets the inputs however it wants, which can include things like them having different behaviours in different flight modes, and there being parameters to reverse the handling of the values. That’s also a fair amount of work for a feature which only applies to certain axis assignments (it only intuitively works for motion axes), which I’m not sure would be worth the extra maintenance and testing loads it would incur…
