Hey guys,

To be honest, I'm not really expecting to find an answer to this, I feel I might have exhausted all of my choices already, but I'm going to ask here anyway, because the Mach community has surprised me in the past.

I started with a Saitek P880 game controller, which I've been using for quite a while. Every once in a while, one of the analog controls would 'stick', and the machine would keep moving instead of stopping. As you can imagine, that's not good for bits, or for fingers. I was convinced that it was because of a crack in the analog sticks, that it was physically sticking. I found a brand new controller (a Saitek P2500) on ebay, and to my surprise, not only does it still happen, but it's actually worse than before. It can happen any time, on any axis. Once in 20-30 movements it might happen.

I've gone through every setting I can find in Keygrabber, which I'm pretty familiar with, but had no luck. I tried installing the Saitek controller drivers, thinking maybe the generic windows drivers were causing problems, no help there either.

It came with a diagnostic program that shows that the joystick actually is centering, but for some reason, keygrabber or mach 3 decides to keep moving anyway. What's strange is, it will keep moving sometimes at a very slow rate, or sometimes close to rapid speed. It just depends on how fast you were moving the machine before releasing the analog stick back to center. All you have to do to stop it is lightly touch the axis again.

My machine is pretty large, and it's impossible to reach the keyboard many times while taking measurements, auto z zeroing and such. I've become pretty reliant on using the controller, but after having the thing smash blades into material, I really need to figure this out.

EDIT: I've tested, and this happens on my nice home pc, as well as the shop pc's.


Thanks for reading, and I look forward to any suggestions.
Z

I have no suggestions for you but wanted to let you know you're not alone and I've just given up on it. 

I think I'm going to end up using the X Box controller with the amazing plug in that has been written for it.

Dave

Just tested using my brother's flight simulator stick too, and had the same results. Unfortunately, it's the same brand as the others, so I can't really say that I learned anything.

Budman, were you having the same problem? Similar controller? Where might I find this xbox plugin?

Yes, and I was using a Logitech GamePad.

Dave

Hahahah, I had an idea.

I went out and found a used Xbox controller. Problem was, I used more button combos than the Xbox plugin allows. Turns out, disabling the axis controls in keygrabber, and redefining the keys for the Xbox controller allows me plugin controlled axis motion, but all the key combos that keygrabber allowed.

This just made my day.


EDIT ... man.. this is just sinking in how cool this is. Shoulder buttons can be CTRL / ALT, each button can be F5 F6 F7 F8, hot key buttons and scripts galore. Wheee! I hope others get some use out of this too!