Joystick Control for Fusion 360

An add-in for Fusion 360 that allows you to use joysticks (and other gamepad controls) to control the active viewport.

Install

1. Download and unzip the repo.
2. In Fusion, open the Scripts and Add-Ins panel (in the Utilities tab) (or, faster, hit Shift+S)
3. Switch to Add-Ins tab
4. Press the green + button
5. Select the repo folder
6. (optional) you probably want to set it to "Run on Startup" so you don't need to start the add-in the next time you restart Fusion 360

Usage

Set up with controls that make sense to me (using an XBox360 controller):

• Left joystick controls panning up/down/left/right
• Right joystick controls rotating up/down/left/right (NOTE: I'm not happy with how vertical rotation works, happy to accept a pull request that would make it operate like the "constrained orbit" control, it current operates like the "free move" control)
• Triggers control zoom (NOTE: a bit buggy the first time you use a trigger to zoom, probably something with my view extent math)
• D-pad (hat) moves to specific view:
  • Up: top
  • Down: bottom
  • Left: left
  • Right: right
• Buttons also do views:
  • B: front
  • A: back
  • X: home
• Since I'm frustrated by "ever so slightly tilted" rotations that I can't figure out, I added a "constrain to primary axis" to the right joystick press (I think that's called "R3" in gamepad buttons?)

Fusion.360.Gamepad.Control.mp4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CueMOJzCEw0

If you don't like this setup, you should be able to configure it by updating the variables at the beginning.

My joysticks seem to sit around .1 when resting, so I made the deadzone .15.

I've set up what I think is a comfortable curve for the panning axes: f((x*10)^3/10):

This can be configured by editing scalePanAxis method.

Implementation notes

Given Fusion 360's weird setup for using libraries, I found it easier to use some simpler libraries, and found pyjoystick. It took some slight modification to get it working using local references to other libraries. I'm not sure how the import pygame in there works, but it seems to work on my local machine. Fusion 360 supposedly operates in a 64 bit architecture container, and I've tested that the sdl dll lookup for windows works. I don't know if it works for mac.

The libraries were installed using pip in a local folder and then copied up to the Modules folder.

The add-in is marked as supporting mac, but I haven't tried it there.

An updated version of the add-in switched to attempting to use pygame, but since it's a very hacky setup to install pygame, that won't work on mac. There's still a chance that we will properly execute the fallback logic and have a working version on mac, but I have far less hope now (especially after I looked into how different the python environment is on mac vs windows).

What's next (if I get the motivation)

• Given that I haven't taken any time to build any configuration UI, I'm holding off on publishing this to the add-in store. I may find the motivation to do that later.
• It'd be great if I could figure out the constrained vertical orbit.
• I don't understand how view extents work, maybe I should figure that out to make sure I'm not doing weird zoom stuff.

If you're interested in these things getting done, a pull request or sponsorship will always help :).