I modified a ThrustMaster A10 joystick for A320 side stick, and changed the control board by using SimVim, the chip MLX90333 hall sensor IC provides quite high resolution. I use the Out1 and Out2 pin for analog output, it works perfect, one axis goes the correct direction, but the other axis goes reversed. I go into analog calibration, and modified the configuration file: devices.prf , and exchange the min and max figure. it does not make sense, and even make the range much more smaller than before.
MLX 90333 hall sensor
I wondered if I can make the axis to be reversed, and where can I change it. I know in the X-Plane settings, there is an option to reverse the axis if the controller is an USB gaming device.

Feb 27, 2021 in FAQs, Tips (Archive) by

1 Answer

Regarding the "high resolution" - it doesn't matter if you use a hall sensor or an ordinary potentiometer. You can not get a higher "resolution" with hall sensor.

The limiting factor  always will be your wiring, electrical noise in the power lines and mechanical backlash, that drops a real number of resolution steps on analog inputs to 100-300 (not the maximum available 1024).

In any joystick, even an expensive one, the sensor movement path is usually no more than 10-20 mm. And, if you theoretically may have 1024 resolution steps, that means 0.01 mm steps that are controlled by your hand, making it totally impracticable. The real "resolution" of a usual joystick is 50-100 "steps"  (I have tried measuring this sometime ago).

An analog axis with a typical good potentiometer should work fine even with long unshielded wires, as you can see on my test video  (just 3 unshielded wires about 3 meters long).
 

The way to get better control handling  is not using "special" sensors, but increasing the sensing path length,
using either a large linear potentiometer (40-60mm path):



or a multi-turn potentiometer (full path is more than 200mm):



.. or as I did in one construction using a simple differential photoelectric scheme:

Vlad

Jul 19, 2023 by

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