Autohotkey and Antimicro

These two ‘A’s are central pillars to the solution offered here - both extremely useful technology.

Autohotkey

Autohotkey (often abbreviated to 'AHK') is an automation scripting language / application. To use the 'XCSoar in VR solution' you don’t need to know much about it, but you do need to install it.

You can get it from: https://www.autohotkey.com/ .

NOTE: You may need to install AutoHotkey 'As Administrator' (Right click on the install file then select ‘Run as Administrator’).

When you have it installed, to create a new script you just Right click on the desktop, select 'New', then 'Autohotkey script'.

You can edit a script with a Right click on a file and selecting 'Edit script'.

A Notepad window will open for editing. Using Notepad you can make any required changes to a script; save the changes when you are done.

You can run a script by double-clicking on it.

Note that anything to the right of a semi colon ";" in a line of an AutoHotkey file will be ingored when the script runs. This is used for comments or to disable code lines.

Antimicro

Antimicro is a control mapping application - that lets you map any buttons on your joystick to anything on your keyboard.

It reduces complexity as you can leave all the keyboard settings in Condor as default; this brings the additional benefit that you can then use either the joystick assigned button OR the keyboard key as required.

You can download it from: https://sourceforge.net/projects/antimicro.mirror/

It looks like this:

Using it is really simple.

All you have to do is click on the joystick button you want to assign, and a keyboard appears - then just select the key you want that button to 'press'.

When you have assigned all the buttons you want, click ‘Save As’ and give the settings a meaningful name.

Making changes is easy - just click again and save.

Then you just need to MAKE SURE IT'S RUNNING (with the correct profile) before you fly.

With Antimicro you can now use a button on the joystick AND the equivalent keyboard button. Pretty handy!

One thing that Antimicro lets you do - that normally you can’t - is assign different functions to the joystick ‘hat’ switch.

You can also use it for zooming and page changes on the Condor PDA and (with Autohotkey) to control your XCSoar view.

You just have to make the changes in Antimicro. Click on the appropriate hat switch direction in Antimicro (e.g. Hat switch ‘Down’) then select the keyboard key you want it to act on (e.g. ‘PgDn’ for PDA zoom out). It’s super quick to do.

For Condor PDA control, you might want to have:

Hat switch ‘Up’ -> ‘PgUp’ (PDA zoom in)

Hat switch ‘Down’ -> ‘PgDn’ (PDA zoom out)

Hat switch ‘Right’ -> ‘M’ (PDA next page)

Antimicro can only help you if it's running. There is an option in Settings to allow you to start it on Windows startup:

For the 'XCSoar in VR' solution, the required scripts for AutoHotkey and settings files for Antimicro are available on the ManyButtons page.

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