IBU3 and IS-2 and feature requests

[lukehallbland]

Picked up an IBU3 from Ian earlier this week to try in a IS-2 (will Tamiya ever update their electronics)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seRk7Ddu04Y


Overall it seems a nice board, there are some things that I'd really love to change in the software though.

Any chance we can have the option of moving gun firing off the elevation controls and onto on the the other channels?
Ability to use multiple stage switches (apologies if this is possible and i've not worked out how) Any chance of putting in an advanced mode for people a bit more comfortable with some added complexities so we can assign particular pulse widths to functions rather than what looks to be a binary on/off control. I don't know if you're feeding the PWM signal to the Cortex M3 or have some other logic in between, but I assume this is still possible to do.
Looks like there may not be mixing between the MG firing elevation/turret rotation, or at least it seems to end abruptly in certain conditions (I will have a play later and try and get a precise reproducer if you want)

[Tankbear]

Hi Luke,

The manufacturer listens to feed back and suggestions so I will pass them on for consideration. Chances are if it can be achieved through the firmware it could be an added feature. If it is hardware restricted then obviously this makes it more difficult.

Ian

[tomhugill]

Picked up an IBU3 from Ian earlier this week to try in a IS-2 (will Tamiya ever update their electronics)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seRk7Ddu04Y


Overall it seems a nice board, there are some things that I'd really love to change in the software though.

Any chance we can have the option of moving gun firing off the elevation controls and onto on the the other channels?
Ability to use multiple stage switches (apologies if this is possible and i've not worked out how) Any chance of putting in an advanced mode for people a bit more comfortable with some added complexities so we can assign particular pulse widths to functions rather than what looks to be a binary on/off control. I don't know if you're feeding the PWM signal to the Cortex M3 or have some other logic in between, but I assume this is still possible to do.
Looks like there may not be mixing between the MG firing elevation/turret rotation, or at least it seems to end abruptly in certain conditions (I will have a play later and try and get a precise reproducer if you want)

Get a programmable transmitter and use channel mixing to achieve this. Fire buttons also work

[lukehallbland]

Picked up an IBU3 from Ian earlier this week to try in a IS-2 (will Tamiya ever update their electronics)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seRk7Ddu04Y


Overall it seems a nice board, there are some things that I'd really love to change in the software though.

Any chance we can have the option of moving gun firing off the elevation controls and onto on the the other channels?
Ability to use multiple stage switches (apologies if this is possible and i've not worked out how) Any chance of putting in an advanced mode for people a bit more comfortable with some added complexities so we can assign particular pulse widths to functions rather than what looks to be a binary on/off control. I don't know if you're feeding the PWM signal to the Cortex M3 or have some other logic in between, but I assume this is still possible to do.
Looks like there may not be mixing between the MG firing elevation/turret rotation, or at least it seems to end abruptly in certain conditions (I will have a play later and try and get a precise reproducer if you want)

Get a programmable transmitter and use channel mixing to achieve this. Fire buttons also work

It certainly can be done like that for firing the main gun and MG, its a bodge for something that should be quite possible in software on the chosen SOC. You could quite easily get multiple actions out of each switch, you've got 800-2200us to play with and a 120Mhz M3 should be able to handle that no problem.

[tomhugill]

IBU3 lets you assign all the functions to different channels like this. On my two I had two channel mix.

[lukehallbland]

Sorry Tom, I think we're taking at cross points and I appreciate you're being helpful and I appreciate what what I'm asking may seem strange.

At the moment I keep one channel for Master volume as that's really useful, I have three channels left to play with, lights on/off, Engine on/off, MG1/MG2. This works great on the IS-2 stock or slightly modified to have two of the MGs flash. What if I wanted an additional servo to do something and i still wanted light control, engine control and ability to select between two MGs. I'm currently out of luck without adding additional hardware.

The hardware solution would be another dev board, take the volume control channel and light channels, configure them both for servos. One is actually used to control a servo, the other is fed into the dev board. I assumne the volume connect is pins 1 vcc, 2 gnd, 3 signal so the dev board ouputs a analog signal to pin 3. This analog signal would be software generated on the dev board using a portion of the servo signal say 800-999us means decrement, 1000-1199us means incriment which is generated by a single toggle (down means 900us, up means 1100us so they can be a bit unstable and it still work without triggering the wrong threshold) lighting control could then use digital outs from the dev board and be triggered by another toggle say using 1200-1399us means off, 1400-1599us means on. I still have 1600-2200us free to do other fun stuff or increase the width of pulse time for the volume control and lighting.

What I am saying is I don't think there's any hardware limitation preventing this from just being done on the IBU3 without having to add an additional dev board. If the option was added (potentially hidden away under an advanced features checkbox or something) that let use assign parts of the additional channels it would be much appreciated by me. I appreciate this might be a fairly niche feature so might not be worth the IBU developer doing. If that is the case, no problem, I will investigate a hardware solution like the one described above if needed.

On the cannon front I will just go and play with openTX mixers, reduce the weighting of the stick so that it can't enter the fire region for the MGs or Main cannon, then set a 3 stage switch two replace the channel value with those when I flick it either up or down. Fine for the IS-2, wouldn't be so happy on a Gepard for example where I'd be using a heavey duty servo and in the past have used a throttle stick to provide absolute rather than relative control as the gun firing would reduce range of motion.

Don't own this model anymore but might give you an idea of what I mean https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaHmCIzubUc

[Tankbear]

You don't have to have lights etc on a separate channel, you can set the left stick to diagonal for 5 seconds so possible to assign 4 actions to that and then channels 5-8 are free for other actions like the volume or sound effects.

This is typically how I set mine up

https://www.dropbox.com/s/tx88c1gu9khuy ... s.jpg?dl=0

[tomhugill]

Sorry Tom, I think we're taking at cross points and I appreciate you're being helpful and I appreciate what what I'm asking may seem strange.

At the moment I keep one channel for Master volume as that's really useful, I have three channels left to play with, lights on/off, Engine on/off, MG1/MG2. This works great on the IS-2 stock or slightly modified to have two of the MGs flash. What if I wanted an additional servo to do something and i still wanted light control, engine control and ability to select between two MGs. I'm currently out of luck without adding additional hardware.

The hardware solution would be another dev board, take the volume control channel and light channels, configure them both for servos. One is actually used to control a servo, the other is fed into the dev board. I assumne the volume connect is pins 1 vcc, 2 gnd, 3 signal so the dev board ouputs a analog signal to pin 3. This analog signal would be software generated on the dev board using a portion of the servo signal say 800-999us means decrement, 1000-1199us means incriment which is generated by a single toggle (down means 900us, up means 1100us so they can be a bit unstable and it still work without triggering the wrong threshold) lighting control could then use digital outs from the dev board and be triggered by another toggle say using 1200-1399us means off, 1400-1599us means on. I still have 1600-2200us free to do other fun stuff or increase the width of pulse time for the volume control and lighting.

What I am saying is I don't think there's any hardware limitation preventing this from just being done on the IBU3 without having to add an additional dev board. If the option was added (potentially hidden away under an advanced features checkbox or something) that let use assign parts of the additional channels it would be much appreciated by me. I appreciate this might be a fairly niche feature so might not be worth the IBU developer doing. If that is the case, no problem, I will investigate a hardware solution like the one described above if needed.

On the cannon front I will just go and play with openTX mixers, reduce the weighting of the stick so that it can't enter the fire region for the MGs or Main cannon, then set a 3 stage switch two replace the channel value with those when I flick it either up or down. Fine for the IS-2, wouldn't be so happy on a Gepard for example where I'd be using a heavey duty servo and in the past have used a throttle stick to provide absolute rather than relative control as the gun firing would reduce range of motion.

Don't own this model anymore but might give you an idea of what I mean https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaHmCIzubUc

You can use the rc tank electronics viper to do remote volume control, there are relay boards for switching between mgs, that gives you another 4 channels programmable, mg firing, main gun firing, lights and engine on, then you could use the epa to disable the mg and main gun firing on the left stick.