Cougar Demo Project

The Cougar Demo Project is completed.

The document is in PDF and in iBook, http://www.hempstick.org/download/manual/CougarDemoShort.pdf and http://www.hempstick.org/download/manual/CougarDemoShort.ibooks. This document is short, providing just a couple of mapping tables for you to wire up and map.

Basically, you ditch the outdated Cougar PCBs, and wire directly to the SAM4S XPLAINED Pro board. Configure the Hempstick mapping tables correctly, compile and burn. And off you go.

I don't consider this to be very useful other than for the F16 crowd. I mean, if I were flying BMS, I'd use a Warthhog with a Cougar stick attached to it. Hall sensor is better than the old pots. Moreover, you don't have to suffer the Cougar gimbal. For the throttle, I could have plugged it with an old Cougar main board, and configure the whole thing in BMS.

However, the practical advantages of using Hempstick are.

Hempstick has 12bit hardware ADC (software enhanced to 14bit)

Hempstick does 1KHz USB reports, Cougar does 100Hz

It's possible to make Hempstick show up as a Cougar and program it in Target

These might be interesting for the F16 crowds, but not exactly a ground breaking thing for others.

Due to my ignorance and age, this project took a bit longer than I expected because I forgot that TMStick actually reports one of the Hat Switches as an USB 8-way Hat Switch and it shuffle the rest of the buttons on the stick up to fill the gap(s). So the TMStick was mapping the buttons incorrectly to the USB report.

I have corrected this wrong mapping and added the 8-way Hat Switch support in Hempstick.