When I first connected my cheap joystick breakout board from Amazon, its high sensitivity was immediately apparent. Full range of deflection mapped to a very small range of physical motion. It was very hard to hold a position between center and full deflection. I was concerned this would become a hindrance, but it wasn't worth worrying about until I actually got everything else up and running. Once Sawppy was driving around on joystick control, I got my own first impressions. Then in the interest of gathering additional data points, I took my rover to a SGVHAK meet to watch other people drive Sawppy with these super twitchy controls.

These data points agree: Sawppy's twitchy controls are problematic to drive smoothly and it's actually running between points fast enough for me to be worried about causing physical damage.

There were two proposed tracks to address this:

First thought was to replace the cheap Amazon joystick module with something that has a larger range of motion allowing finer control. [Emily] provided a joystick module salvaged from a remote control aircraft radio transmitter. Unlike arcade game console joysticks which demand fast twitch response, radio control aircraft demands smoothness which is what Sawppy would appreciate as well. The downside of using a new joystick module is the fact I would have to design and build a new enclosure for it, and there wasn't quite enough time.

So we fell back to what hardware projects are always tempted to do: fix the problem in software. I modified the Arduino control code to cap the amount of change allowed between each time we read joystick values. By dampening the delta between each read, Sawppy became sluggish and less responsive. But this sluggishness also allowed smoother driving which is more important at the moment so that's the software workaround in place for Maker Faire.

This code is currently in Sawppy's Github repository starting with this code change and a few fixes that followed.