Joystick and POV (point of view)

[Bunford]

I'm just wondering, how does the POV work on joysticks?

I'm about to start some mods. Considered an old Trust JGM2550 joystick I have as the brain. It's USB and plug and play, so no drivers needed for Windows. Here it is:

http://www.trust.com/products/product.aspx?artnr=15077

I'm wondering, how does the top POV 8-way button work? Also, there's things like a throttle lever (assumingly analogue) and there's the joustick movement as well as the fact it twists from side to side.

I'm just wondering if it's possible to incorporate this as a brain with plenty of buttons and a few analogues. I'm just wondering, if it'd be possible to hook up something like a DS screen to it to make a Kaoss Pad type X-Y control using the POV connectors?

I know nothing about this stuff, but just prodding ideas at the moment!

[Archies'bald]

Here's my limited understanding of POV, that I've taught myself.

The POV is basically a series of digital switches and when they are pressed at the same time they give a different reading to normal switches. For instance, if you press buttons 1 and 2 on a gamepad, the pad will register 1 & 2. If you press two buttons on a POV they could cancel themselves out and you will get no signal at all.

The way some people have got round this is by moveing any POV buttons far away from each other. That way there is less chance of pushing them at the same time and cancelling each other out. A good way of seeing what I mean is by going in to the properties section of the joystick and pressing the POV buttons - then watch how the calibration dot moves around the screen. If one button is pressed the dot will move left, right, up or down. If two buttons are pressed then something different will happen. It may go up to a corner or even return to the centre.

[Bunford]

Wow. That's even better then isn't it? Doesn't that open an opportunity for a kind of "natural modifier" in the mapping? Though, thinking about it, it seems like it would a pain to figure out maybe and perhaps difficult to separate then out fully maybe, as well as finding the buttons to map to in Traktor.