Buttons on wheels

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by J0E, Sep 11, 2020.

  1. J0E

    J0E Registered

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    I've been toying with the idea of moving from my G27 to a new wheel just because I am confident it will cure all my bad habits and make me a better racer because I will be lighter in the wallet and therefore quicker to react. My question today is about buttons and knobs on wheels. Let's say I were to get something like this Thrustmaster https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/prod...er_4160571_Ferrari_F1_Wheel_Add_On.html/?ap=y . Or an F1 Clubsport https://fanatec.com/us-en/steering-wheels/clubsport-lenkrad-formula-v2s. They have dials and knobs as well as buttons. I'm wondering about programming the knobs. In RF2 control setups, you generally map a button to a function. For example, there's a fuel mix up and a fuel mix down and not a fuel lean, fuel normal, fuel rich. If you get a fancy F1 wheel with all those buttons are they really all programmable and useful in RF2?
     
  2. Lazza

    Lazza Registered

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    The thrustmaster F1 wheel has a POV switch (like the one on the G27 shifter), a separate 4-way switch (which is just 4 buttons), and 2 rotaries (the knobs up where your thumbs can reach them) which are just another 4 buttons (1 up and 1 down each). Then there's 8 buttons and the 3 switches down the bottom (they're just a single button each; up and down do the same thing). Everything else you see is just for show and doesn't do anything or even move.

    Now, I can say all that because I have the wheel, so I can't tell you what other options have (the fanatec gear is a step up and I think does offer some more actual functionality, at least in theory).

    rF2 doesn't support position encoding. So you can't assign a proper position encoder/switch to a control like fuel mix and then select a fuel mix position 1-9 (for example) and have rF2 use those. Each control in rF2 is its own independent input, so depending on the wheel you may be able to configure individual rotary positions to those separate controls, but that doesn't let you create any more controls than exist. So mapping out all the individual fuel mix positions or sway bar positions or some different brake bias positions (for example) isn't possible. Basically if you can't do what you want by assigning controls to your keyboard you won't get any more with a fancy wheel.

    Different wheel drivers/software may offer some sort of macro support, or you could try using some third party tools, but depending what you'd be looking to control it would be a bit of a hack and probably wouldn't work too well.

    I guess the short answer is no.
     
  3. Bill Worrel

    Bill Worrel Registered

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    I've heard that some wheels can be programmed. I don't know exactly how they work but an example might be to have a 4 position rotary switch that's tied into 2 buttons on the wheel (plus and minus). Then when the rotary is in position 1, the plus and minus buttons increase or decrease the fuel mixture. When the rotary is in position 2, the plus and minus buttons increase or decrease the brake bias, etc.

    Then you can have more functions with fewer buttons.
     
  4. J0E

    J0E Registered

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    Lazza, that was exactly the information I was seeking.Thank you. Since I drive in VR, buying for looks is a waste. I was kind of thinking of buying a wheel and then using my 3D printer, CNC, lathe, etc., to build replacement wheels that would match the virtual ones. That would be a pretty big project though. But I lie in bed trying to convince myself that buttons on the virtual wheel in the same location as the physical one would be the the ticket for me to graduate from crappy racer to not so crappy racer.
    Bill, I did something similar to that with an Arduino Teensy when I was driving one of the F1 201x games. That game was heavily governed by stepping through menus in the MFD as I recall, so programming macros was difficult. Keeping track of the location of the cursor on the MFD pages was difficult. Every time you opened the MFD (it closed automatically after a few seconds), it could be on a different page or on a different item on that page.
     

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