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What has changed?
Board size went from 5.5" x 5.5" to 3.5" x 2.5"
It might be considerably smaller footprint, but we packed a lot more on to it through the use of modern miniature electronic components. One of our design goals was to reduce board size to 3.5" x 5.0", and like most other goals we had; we designed far past it.
Bus-powered USB device.
Another design goal was to get the device bus-powered and under 500mA. We are currently at <200ma with all 8 axes active. We did this by re-designing major sections of the board, namely the analog section.
Auto-Calibrating Analog inputs.
This is one of the best features of the whole board. We had some good discussions about the analog circuit on the Rev-B board. After re-examining the architecture, Kevin did a total redesign of the analog circuit, and it works great. The only downside was it needed to be manually calibrated. We then started toying with an auto-calibrating idea. This required us to etch two new boards to refine it to a very well functioning auto-calibrator and very stable, almost jitter free at 10 bit axis inputs. Now let me give you some biased observations of the card: We can take any standard joystick and plug it into any standard joystick card and watch the pointer jump around, then plug our card to the same computer and joystick, and there is little to no jitter or jumping around. Even with poor quality joysticks, we have very good results.
What is coming?
I have started on the configuration and flashing programming. Currently we are planning to release two versions of the board. The first one will be a stripped down version with only analog inputs. With this you will be able to plug your existing joystick or sim to the card, and gain the smoothness and precision you never thought possible. We have friends around here that swear by their joysticks and don't want to use anything else, for them we decided to build this version of the card. There will be a basic configuration program that will help you define your axes and button types. The second product to be released will be the fully functioning version with both analog and encoder inputs. Also this version will be expandable to include Force feedback and some other secret add-ons. The configuration program for this one will allow you to set endpoints, ratio thresholds, center and endpoint dead zones, axis definitions, button definitions, and more.
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