An earlier post referred to the Griffin Powermate, which is a very nice
little control. We found the Contour ShuttleXpress A/V controller to be
even better and available for slightly more cost. The Shuttle Express is
the black version of the control, there is another idential unit that is
silver colored, with 5 programmable (see for example
http://www.smalldog.com/product/42708 ). There is a larger version, the
ShuttlePro which has enough buttons to program the equivalent to the
TenTec Jupiter or Pegasus remote encoder.
Griffin Technologies makes much of all kinds of ways of combining pushing
and turning the PowerMate single control, the ShuttleXpress was designed
as a jog shuttle control for audio/visual work and has a central control
knob that can be spun with the finger either direction for as long as you
care to do so, or use the ring which can be turned right or left and
control set to vary the rate of control applied depending upon how far the
dial is rotated. Then the 5 keys can be programmed either in combination
with the two dials or independently with complex commands.
We've just begun to explore what we can do with Carl N4PY's software using
the ShuttleXpress. I'll post a control file to our web site if anyone is
interested. Neat thing is we can program the controls to be consistent
whether in N4PY's software or MixW which we are beginning to use in
conjunction with the N4PY rig control. Now if only we could get the thing
to work with one of those Cybiko PDAs (some have USB ports, but alas no
drivers as yet), we'd have a little shuttle control and remote display
unit w/o a PC for instant on operation of the Pegasus.
Cheers & 73s de Mark W4CHL
Chapel Hill NC USA http://rtpnet.org/parc
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