Serially attached RC transmitter?

[Grant_Edwards]

The Heli-X home page says that a USB interface or transmitter is required.

I've got an "FMS PIC" serial cable for my transmitter, and I have written a driver so that it shows up as a 6-axis joystick device /dev/input/js0. [It works the same way that the Linux zhenhua joystick driver does.]

Will this work with Heli-X or do I really need a USB transmitter?

[Michael]

Hi,

it should, I guess. Just try it out and let us know.

Michael

[Grant_Edwards]

it should, I guess. Just try it out and let us know.

It works fine.

I had the Java "link error" using the jinput library included with the heli-x download library, so I had to get a newer copy of of libjinput-linux.so from

http://java.net/projects/jinput.

If anybody else wants to use an RC transmitter with an "FMS PIC" serial cable, you
can get my fmspic Linux joystick driver from

http://www.panix.com/~grante/files/rc/fmspic.tar.gz

Here's the Readme.txt file from the above tarball

Code: Select all

This is a joystick driver for an RC transmitter connected to a serial
port via a 9600 baud "FMS PIC" adapter cable.  [It was developed using
3.3 and 3.5 kernels, but probably isn't too version-specific.]

Note: there are two mutually-incompatible types of "FMS PIC" serial
cables:

  1) Sync byte of 0XF0+(#channels) running at 9600 baud.

  2) Sync byte of 0xFF running at 19200 baud.

This driver only supports the 0xF0+#channels variety. It shouldn't be
hard to add support for the other variety, but I don't have one to
test with.

This driver was based on the "zhenhau.c" driver found in the the
kernel source tree.

The included Makefile, will build against the currently running kernel
and also also includes these targets:

   insert: inserts the fmspic.ko module into the running kernel
           (removing it first if it's already loaded).

   remove: removes the fmspic module from the running kernel

   attach: runs the "inputattach" command to connect the serial port
           specified by the SERPORT variable to the fmspic module.

[Grant_Edwards]

If anybody else wants to use an RC transmitter with an "FMS PIC" serial cable, you
can get my fmspic Linux joystick driver from ...

Moved to https://github.com/GrantEdwards/fmspic/

[Grant_Edwards]

Moved to https://github.com/GrantEdwards/fmspic/

There's a user-space version of the driver that uses the uinput API at

https://github.com/GrantEdwards/fmspic-uinput/

It's simpler to build/use than the kernel module.