Gordon Mc
Posts: 7644
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Joined: 1/30/2002
Last Login: 11/8/2009
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Matt – thanks, but I didn't see any of the posts as being any more 'aggressive' than I myself am being here in trying to communicate my point. Anyway, I'm totally OK with a heated debate if it helps figure out where the disconnect is, and helps lead to a solution / understanding , etc.
Todd & Gerhard – based on your posts you seem to be reading something different than what I have been writing. If you check my wording, you should see that I'm not saying there ISN'T a way of configuring everything to work on my Weatronic RX – simply that the repeated shuffles htat were required to find an acceptable setup were sufficiently time consuming and frustrating that it was quicker for me to give up and install a matchbox for the last function than keep fussing with the software til I could get an "acceptable" combo. While some may just shrug their shoulders and accept the hassle because they don't know that it can be made quite a bit easier for them, my software engineering background simply makes me frustrated at how a powerful system can be made less powerful by its software.
This isn't a HUGE issue – it's a small problem that just happens to bug me enough for me to want to avoid dealing with it again if at all possible. However, it seems that the longer the debate goes on without us really comprehending each other, the more of a big issue it may seem to be in the forum. Essentially, I'm saying "There's a molehill over here, and I don't like molehills", you guys are saying "There is no molehill", I'm saying "Sure there is – it's right there…" etc … and in our inability to agree whether there is a molehill or not, the disagreement itself (as opposed to the origin of the disagreement) becomes more of a mountain. Again, I don't want this to be something that could lose anyone sales (I doubt that it would, since no-one with any sense gives a hoot about my twisted opinions  ), so it's up to you guys whether we should continue to debate this here or take it offline if you think that the continuing public debate looks bad. I'm OK either way.
BTW Gerhard –you told me previously about the need to avoid having the same reg driving multiple high-power servos for the same surface/function, and there being FOUR regulators in my RX, not the 8 mentioned in this thread (I guess that increased # of reg's is new for the 2.4 system? cool.). Based on that, it isn't simply a case of following white and pink squares, since the software was inconsistent in showing pink squares for outputs that share the same reg – it blocks out outputs that are 8 apart, not those that are 4 apart which also (from your prior description) should be avoided for similar major control surfaces etc.
Now, the comments along the lines of "all you have to do is sit and plan your entire RX channel assignment right at the very beginning" may well be fine for e.g. people who only ever want to assemble ARFS whose functionality is completely laid out for you from the get go. The Jag in which I used my Weatronic RX was not such a simplistic project. No kits of this model were built yet, so I was having to figure a lot of the stuff out as I went along. At the point when I was programming the major flight controls, and making up the custom wiring harness for them, I had not yet made all of the decisions as to whether I would have operational airbrakes, whether I would install a lighting kit, or a bomb- or tank-drop, whether I would need additional servos or electronic air-valves to handle the complex interactions of 11 (!!) gear doors that sometimes overlap each other (yuch!), etc., etc. So, the "you should plan every single servo assignment out before plugging the first servo wire in" concept just doesn't cut it IMO, unless Weatronics wants to market the RX as something only suitable for people who never want / need to add any new functionality to their aircraft after the fist servo is plugged in. (Slight exaggeration, but hopefuly you get the idea). Instead, I bought it as something that was marketed as having complete flexibility in channel <-> servo mapping… a promise which it failed to deliver on, and that's the start of my frustration. Maybe a small point to some, but the starting point of cumulative frustration for me, since without this initial issue the follow-up annoyances would not also have arisen.
Now, remember what I said about my custom wiring harness (thanks for the Ashlok stuff Todd – works very well and I will use these again). This means that if it comes to juggling servo outputs around when the software won't allow certain combinations, either I am limited somewhat in which slots I can move certain servos to (easy to move them an inch or so, but not much further, and the RX is what- 5" across ?), or I have to remake parts of the wiring harness – which again was certainly doable, but was annoying when I knew that the limit I was fighting against was completely unnecessary. There's some added frustration.
Next, when I go to move a given servo from slot X to slot Y, I find that too to be unnecessarily time consuming. Now, maybe I'm just a dumb*ss who hasn't figured out how to use the s/w properly yet, but here's the deal – if I could select two servo assignments and hit "switch", and / or cut & paste entire servo assignments to a clipboard / buffer / 2nd aircraft setup, then switching assignments around could be quick and pretty painless. Instead, what I ended up doing was to have to go into each servo's info and write all of its settings down, then re-enter that info in the various screens for the new slot that I will be assigning that servo's location to. Given that things like setting the throws for the servo can't even be done by text entry (why not ??) and instead I had to keep moving the mouse up & down, up & down, overshooting and then undershooting the value I wanted until luck intervened and I got the desired value – that again takes up time unnecessarily, and adds another layer of frustration especially when I have to do it multiple times. The cummulative effect of multiple small annoyances, hit mutiple times each, became enough of an issue that I gave up and shoved a matchbox in instead.
(BTW, the poor control that leads to over / undershoot seems to be a problem on the S/W for the older RXs, but not on the new stuff – so kudos on that improvement.)
If you absolutely must put in the restrictions in such a broad manner (which I believe unnecessary, but you seem stuck on), you could perhaps consider alleviating any hassles associated with that by e.g. treating servos as objects that can be copied / moved in their entirety so as to make the shuffling process go much quicker. In case I'm not being clear here, let's consider an made-up-on-the-spur-of-the-moment example – I have the RX completely set up the way I want it for 16 servo outputs, but then I decide to add a 17th output for bomb-drop. Slot 17 is empty. Due to the way I want to activate it, and the restrictions you want to put on the system, I can't do this without shuffling stuff around. I believe that I can achieve what I need by moving the new servo to 16 instead of 17, move the existing servo 16 to servo 12, and existing servo 12 to 17. (These are arbitrarily chosen numbers, so don't try to read anything into the chosen numbers !). So, I select servo 12 and drag-and-drop, or cut-then-paste it to 17. All of the settings that were associated with servo 12, move to servo 17 without me having to spend a bunch of time manually redoing the whole thing. Then I do the same for moving servo 16 to 12, and then I use slot 16 for my new control.
From a user's perspective that process is pretty painless, compared to the awkward manual stuff I went through. It's also a change that I think ALL of your users would value, even if they are not currently complaining about missing user-friendliness aspects of the UI, and while it isn't as clean a solution to me as removing unnecessary restrictions, it's a compromise that I would personally find usable.
Such copy-paste capability could even be used to do more complex shuffles by making a copy of the model and then using one file as the source and the second as the destination for the rearranged data. If it makes it easier to understand, think of it in terms of an Excel spreadsheet that you want to rearrange ; make two copies of the spreadsheet, and you can copy-paste not only individual cell data (== a single component of a servo's setup), but also an entire row (== a servo's entire setup) from the original sheet to the new, re-ordered, one.
Again, if I'm a dumb*ss who can't see that that functionality is already there, then I'd be happy to be educated in that respect, and I'll publicly 'fess up to how much of an eejit I've been.
Actually … I just compared the S/W for the new RXs and that or the old one – looks like the new one does have a servo-copy capability in it, which the s/w fo rmy old RX does not ? (There's a "Copy Servosettings" button, which I have not yet figured out how to use – no mention of it in the manuals I downloaded.) Does this allow what I just described above ?
Gordon
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BTW, I finally remembered a situation from many years ago, that may help as an analogy about what some of my frustration here has been…
In a town (Dunfermline) in Scotland that I used to live next to, I went to an Asda supermarket on a Sunday to buy groceries. As I approached the area where the bread was, I found that there was a barricade (poles + caution tape) right across the main isle at that end of the building, cordoning off the area where the bread was. I asked the Supermarket manager why we were being prevented from getting access to the bread aisle, and he responded "It's for your protection, to prevent you breaking the law".
Dumbfounded, I asked what was illegal about buying a loaf of bread, and he responded that there was an Alcohol aisle adjacent to the bread aisle, and that the law prohibited the sale of alcohol on Sunday. I said "That's fine, I don't want to buy alcohol, just bread ; if you reposition your barricade slightly, it will block off the alcohol but still provide access to the bread." He just looked confused and repeated "The barricade is for your protection, to prevent you breaking the law". I tried several times to get across the point that the positioning of his barricade was unnecessarily heavy-handed in that it prevented perfectly legal purchases, not just the illegal ones, but we were getting nowhere. Eventually, he said "If you'd just do your shopping on Saturday instead of Sunday, there would be no problem". True, but again totally missing the point. The store was heavily advertised as being open on Sundays, so why should I have to change my shopping day to Saturday just because this store manager can't comprehend that there's nothing wrong with me buying bread on a Sunday ?
My frustration was again not just at the unnecessarily broad restrictions that were put in place, but at the fact that I could not seem to adequately explain to this guy, facts which to me seemed blindingly obvious. Whether he was having comprehension problems, or I was having problems in adequately articulating my message, I don't know – but either way the exchange just left us both frustrated.
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"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." - Aldous Huxley
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RE: 2.4 GHz Weatronics, PPM or PCM? - 
