Q Light Controller+

I was pleased to see that HID support was added for OS X as it turns out it could be very useful for a show that I have coming up next week wherein I would like to use my movers as followspots. So I picked up a Logitech Extreme 3D Pro joystick today to test it out. Unfortunately, it's not workable for me right now. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong as I've never used this before, so I thought I would see if someone could point me in the right direction.

First and foremost, the joystick shows up just fine. No problems there.

Initially I tried simply assigning the joystick to an X/Y pad on my console wherein I discovered that clicking the "Auto Detect" button on the Pan channel actually activates Auto detect on the Tilt channel and vice-versa (so that's clearly a bug) but it was easy enough to work around that.

However once assigned I am experiencing the same thing as the individual in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=7710&p=32749&hilit=HID#p32749

Specifically:

2. The image is drifting while I am not holding the joystick. It will stop for a moment and then start drifting, not always in the same direction.

In short, the position always ends up at one corner of the X/Y Grid.

So, I remembered that "Relative Mode" was added specifically to address this a few revisions ago, so I made up a Input Profile for my device setting the Pan/Tilt channels to relative and selected that Input Profile for this device. Unfortunately, there was no change in the behavior. Ultimately, I'm not sure if something isn't working correctly or if I'm not working something correctly, but in either case, HID isn't usable for me at this point. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

Hi George, apparently you are experiencing things seen on other OSes, so this is not specifically related to OSX.
My biggest concern here was the OSX integration, but it seems to be working fine so far.

See, the problem here is that there are a number of joysticks/gamepads out there, so to fully cover this topic I would need to buy at least a dozen of devices and see which differences they have.
What you're calling bugs, are not actually there on some other devices. I've got a single gamepad for the tests and I don't experience what you describe.

There are several variables such as:
- center offset: being a 16bit value, it can be halfway of an unsigned ( 0 to 65,535 ) or signed ( -32,768 to 32,767 )
- inverted axis: see above. I don't own a device with such property
- analog pad: my gamepad has a button to activate discrete or continuous values
- (QLC+) relative mode: this changes a lot the logic of a value received from a device and might not be appropriate in some cases

To make it short: QLC+ should have a "calibration tool", like most videogames have, to auto-learn the device peculiarities and behave on those.
Again, I don't have enough devices to even start coding a tool like that, so unless a few users are willing to build QLC+ from sources and provide debug messages for their joysticks/gamepads, there's not much I can do to have a unified solution for everyone.
OR users can donate so I can purchase a few devices (they pick)

Hi Massimo,

I was wondering if this might be the issue. In my particular case, it seems like what it probably boils down to is that the joystick isn't really at dead center (or sending no values) when it's physically in the middle. Perhaps I'll just have to try out another controller and see if I can make that work better. Luckily, this is a pretty specific application and not something that I normally use.

What's the name of the joystick you tried by the way ?

It was a Logitech Extreme 3d Pro (a.k.a. the only joystick that my local Best Buy had in stock).