Not exactly sure what you mean by "general purpose computing" but it certainly isn't hard to hook the internal controller boards up as a standalone controller if that's what you are after. I also wouldn't count on this becoming available to purchase either, we haven't really given that aspect of it any serious thought yet.
I mean running a desktop shell, and being useful for office, development, whatever, as well as emulation and gaming.
I guess I'll have to settle on a less pretty rpi CM4 based game console then, haha
Oh so you're talking about on the actual unit itself? Yes this is one thing I want to at least try out on this device, it should handle a full linux desktop environment just fine. The big issue is going to be actually interfacing with the thing, I can make one of the joysticks function as a mouse and the buttons can all be keyboard buttons but other than that I can't really see it being hugely useful for anything other than gaming due to the limited control options.
Yeah, I'm still trying to figure that part out. My gut says to have text input be the 4 shoulder buttons plus one or two of the ABXY buttons and use the other two ABXY as "mouse buttons", but needing to take your thumb off the joystick to click might be kind of annoying. The other joystick could do the kinds of things that scroll wheels do and the d-pad would be arrow keys.
On my previous project (which was windows based) I used the right joystick as the mouse. It works quite well, I think I actually prefer it over a track pad for most tasks. I had top and bottom right shoulder buttons for left and right click and when top left shoulder is held down the joystick becomes a "scroll wheel". I had ABXY assigned to common keyboard keys used in games (from memory, A/Enter, B/Space, X/Shift, Y/Ctrl) start was ESC, I think select was backspace, dpad was arrow keys and my left joystick was on digital mode and was set as WASD. It worked pretty well for games that didn't have gamepad support and just for navigating windows and shifting files around. I also had a mode button which would switch from keyboard/mouse mode back to gamepad mode.
Yeah, that sounds almost exactly like what I'm thinking, except I would go with a chorded/chording keyboard rather than have the keys be specific commonly used keys.
i'm building a CM4 using a pro micro for control, would be very interested in seeing your code for it as its the bit I'm struggling with!
No worries, here's a link to the latest version of my code:
Sorry about the delay, busy week!
That's odd, I'm sure I set it to "anyone with link" mode. I've updated the settings and tried again with a fresh link, hopefully that fixed it.
Yeah we are getting there. Stoned and I both have some other stuff going on keeping us from working on this as much as we would like but progress is being made slowly. I did get a successful batch of buttons out of the mold but haven't had a chance to take any good photos yet. Still have to make molds for the D-Pad and lower trigger buttons.
Oooo I like where this is going. Can't wait to see some more.
