CJ Deka

This thread is now the 2nd result on Google for 'Second Life Flycam' which isn't promising... Surely there must be lots of people using it for machinima & whatnot?

I have an accelerometer conencted to an Arduino which is set up to imitate a standard USB HID joystick that can be used by any Second Life viewer. I want to use it to control the vertical pitch of the camera - eg if I tilt the accelerometer upwards, the camera pitches upwards by the same amount then stops, if I return the accelerometer to level, the camera pitches back to level & stops. This behaviour is captured by the '3D Cursor' option. This only works in Flycam but I can probably live with that. The aim is to allow you to look around a sim using a tablet computer by physically moving it (think like taking a photo with a digital camera with the screen on the back). The accelerometer is probably only going to be concerned with vertical pitch - direction/bearing has to relate to real world bearings so a magnetometer (digital compass) will probably be used for that. The problem I'm having is that the Flycam 'drifts' away from its 'rest' position. When the accelerometer is flat, it sends the equivalent of 0 along the Y axis of the 'joystick'. This should always equate to the camera looking straight ahead, parallel with the ground. When the accelerometer is tilted upwards, it sends the equivalent reading along the Y axis & the camera should tilt upwards the correct amount. When calibrated, the camera should look perpendicular upwards when the accelerometer is tilted 90 degrees up & perpendicular down when tiled 90 degrees down. Whenever the accelerometer is returned to being flat, the camera should return to its rest position. It seems to work fine as long as I don't tilt beyond about 30-40 degrees. I can tilt up & down umpteen times by this amount & the camera will return to level when the accelerometer is put back flat on the table. But when I start to tilt to more extreme angles, the Flycam doesn't return to the horizontal position - its 'rest' position drifts up or down. If I tilt all the way up to the sky, the rest position falls so that when I return the accelerometer to being flat the camera is looking beneath the avatar's feet. If I tilt all the way down to the ground, the rest position rises so the camera comes to rest above the avatar's head. The more I tilt, the worse this becomes, until the camera is facing in completely the opposite direction it should when flat! Can anybody explain what is going on here? I suspect there is something about Flycam that I am not understanding, as I had never used it before today - it's almost as if the Flycam's position changes when I tilt it to more extreme angles, so that the 'rest' position does indeed move & that this behaiour is expected? I can't really find any good explanations/guides about Flycam online, so an advice or links would be very welcome.