Added support for daisy-chained sidewinder gamepads #84
Conversation
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1st: 2 are working without problems, but only with exact 2. I have 4 for testing. |
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I was playing around with it more last evening. Something odd is happening with the joystick count. I don't know if it happened when I synced my branch or what because I had had tried those scenarios before. This will take some investigation. I'll post an update. |
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Look like you used the current main which break the support of the 3D Pro |
I second this. I was testing yesterday and thought that I had bricked my adapter. Tried today with 3 and 4 Sidewinders and noticed exactly the same behavior, Unknown USB device unless it's configured for 2 gamepads with both connected. |
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Thanks for testing. Yeah, I'm not sure what went wrong but I'll post an update when I figure it out.
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Was using too much memory with 4 hid descriptors. Cut that back to 1. Fixed logic with joystick count where it was left uninitialized. Bumped joystick and sidewinder max count to 4.
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The code was using too much ram when storing the USB hid descriptors. I cut that back down to the original size by re-using the descriptor for all 4 gamepads. I also found a case where the joystick count wasn't being detected properly. This could be what was impacting other sidewinders. Haven't so far it is running good for me with 1 or 2 gamepads and the max count set to 4. I don't have other sidewinder accessories to try though. |
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Hi, Thanks for the update. With 4 attached, the LED on the side of Pin14 is blinking rapidly, 3 are working, but sometimes (see 3.) game CPL is hanging. 3DPro ist still not working at all. But I guess this is a problem of #85 |
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@dferyance |
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I acquired 2 more gamepads via ebay. 3 seems to work ok, and I can replicate 4 not working. I suspect it is a power supply issue. The last one in the chain has a very dim led and I also see a blinking light on the arduino. This will take some investigation but it is possible that the 4 just won't work with the hardware. I might have some time this weekend to look into it. What is odd, I'd expect that all 4 leds would be in parallel and thus the same brightness. But instead, it is acting like it is wired in series and each one down the chain is a little dimmer. |
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This has to be a serious issue. USB 2.0 gives you up to 500mA. Arduino takes around 200mA and each gamepad takes about the same. Already with two gamepads in series you risk to burn your USB port. I wouldn't suggest to use more, than one joystick per USB adapter without additional power supply with at least 200mA per device. For four devices and the arduino you'd need at least 1A. |
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You normally can not damage the USB port. You just get only 500mA
But even is 3 is the maximum, it is still a very great improvement !! |
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You can actually destroy an USB port if it has no over current protection. I fried one, so speaking out of experience :) |
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The newer USB normally should have a protection ;-) |
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It looks like the arduino pro micro has a PTC on its input. This is good to help protect the USB port. But it likely is causing some voltage drop. I'm seeing a lower voltage (3.6v) on the end of the chain with the gameport adapter while with my real gameport I see about 4v. My guess is the sidewinder intentionally has a diode drop on the power lines to avoid overloading the gameport if you plug in too large of a chain. It could be the combination of PTC + diode drops causes the 4th to not have enough voltage. So far I don't see this happening though. I used an interposer to inject power directly into the 4th and it still doesn't communicate. So that points at a communication issue. |
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Had the same Idea and also added an add. 5V power to the last one. |
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Made a Osci measurement, since forgot the modified cable for the lab, I did only some voltage measurements. |
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The latest fix for the 3D Pro fixes also the non working 3dpro with the daisy chain mod |
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Nice! This is a very cool contribution. I would like to rethink how joysticks can be registered and may be change the interfaces, so such things can be made easier in the future, but I'll have to think about it a little bit. Give me some days to propose something. So far one more question, is it actually possible to daisy chain different (Sidewinder) devices? Do you know, what Microsoft says about it? |
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Yes, with a real Gamport you can add a Microsoft Joystick behind a MS GamePad. BTW the fix for the 3Dpro dosen't fix the max3 devices issue. |
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Here some Info from an old KB |
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I was able to look over this a little over the weekend. My current hypothesis is there is a problem with the way I did the USB-hid code. I can replicate the error with no game pads connected in analog mode by hard-coding the joystick count to 4. I also was able to check the sidewinder communication with my logic analyzer with 4 and all 4 are sending packets ok. So this is pretty much ruling out anything to do with the sidewinder connection. The USB hid is tricky as it has to detect how many you have in the chain instead of knowing ahead of time how many interfaces to report. Even with the logic to initialize the pluggable usb later in the initialization process, I think some kind of state or counter must be getting setup wrong. This is hard to trace through especially as turning on logging disables the rest of the USB. I feel like there should be only a single instance of HidDevice instead of the 4. But this may require more significant changes to the USB code than I had hoped to get away with. |
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This puzzle has been bothering me so I was digging through USB code late last night but I finally found the exact problem. It ended up simpler than I had thought. The USB stack has some tight limits. The number of endpoints is limited to 7 in USBDesc.h. 1 endpoint is the control endpoint, 3 are taken up by the serial comms so that leaves 3 for our use. The USB code in question is part of the arduino libraries. So it isn't a simple change to this repo to increase the limit. The one option I see that doesn't require modifying the arduino libraries is to disable the CDC serial console by defining CDC_DISABLED. This has the downside that you must enter bootloader mode to re-flash the firmware. But disabling CDC does work.
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Yes, I thought about it yesterday, that the limitation might come from the Arduino library itself, but I had no time to answer. I would say, we can mention it in the documentation, but per default we should just limit the amount of gamepads to 3. In the most cases nobody has as many SW Gamepads and if more required, you can still use another adapter. With USB it is not a problem. This daisy chaining feature was introduced back then, because GamePort was usually limited to one on a PC. It's cool to have it implemented though, I just have to find some time to rearrange the device registration code a bit. |
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Thanks for finding the root cause. Perhaps we can raise a issue at Arduino lib to increase the USB stack ;-) |
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The ATmega32U4 datasheet indicates:
So looks like a MCU limitation. |
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I updated my branch to include a calculation regarding how many endpoints are available. So if you build it with defaults, it will auto-limit to 3. But if you build it with CDC_DISABLED, it will allow all 4. I think this is the best we can do. With CDC enabled (which is default), you don't need to go to bootloader mode to reprogram and it is limited to 3. But with CDC disabled, all 4 are supported but reprogramming requires bootloader mode. |
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Perfect - Thanks |
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Just tried it on Win11. |
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Any Update for Win11 ? |
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I don't currently run Windows 11 and don't plan to any time soon. So if someone else wants to look into Windows 11 issues maybe? |
This is adding support for up to 2 daisy-chained sidewinder gamepads. The code is generic enough that I think it will work with the maximum of 4, but I don't have 4 to test with.
Partially fixes #10 . The reason I say partial is that issue 10 is also requesting passthrough. These changes do not address passthrough.