I’ve made a few scripts lately, and I’ve always designed them with the Handy in mind (I own a Handy, so I understand the movements, but as I have no experience with other devices, I can’t comment). But one thing I’ve always tried to keep in mind, is that I read that the Handy can go no faster than 400mm/s, so I try to keep the speed on my scripts below 400 unit/s (I assume this is mm/s) on Funscripter (So I often have to use creative methods to get around this, such as fast strokes, with shorter distances).
With the Handy, and other devices, what is the official speed limit? And what happens if it is exceeded? I know with the Handy, it still works, but it just doesn’t complete the full stroke.
I’m assuming you’re talking about OpenFunScripter, in which case units/sec is not mm/s, but percentage points per second. 100 units means one full half-stroke, moving from position 0 to position 100, or vice versa.
So 400 units/sec means moving up or down the full range four times in one second.
The Launch is slower than the Handy, but not by very much. It more or less does the same thing the Handy does, which is to stop the current movement and start the next one, but it’s far less graceful about it. Trying to go too fast with the Launch typically results in stuttering. That’s more to do with the command rate it can handle than the speed, though.
The OSR2’s limits are based on the choice of servo, but in all cases it’s going to be a lot faster than the Handy. Speeds which cause the Handy to shorten its strokes by half (because the next command interrupts the previous one) will run at full speed on an OSR2.
The Handy will limit the speed itself if the script is too fast, so don’t be afraid to go ham on it. Just make sure that the points are spaced at least by 50ms for shorter strokes and 100ms for long strokes for best result. Producer says that the limit is 600mm/s, but in reality it’s closer to 400mm/s.
The Handy seems to handle high command rates just fine, so if you’ve scripted strokes which are too fast, it will just get the next movement command before the previous one has finished, and start moving in the other direction. The effect is that very fast strokes are automatically shortened, though exactly where will be somewhat random. You can still shorten them manually so they’re consistently at the same spot (i.e. near the top, bottom, or middle).
Same general thing happens for the Launch, but it can’t handle as high a command rate, so even if you shorten the strokes, very fast stroking is likely to make it stutter. Something targeted specifically at the Launch should have the stroke interval kept above around 100-150ms, regardless of how long the stroke is. A lot also depends on the BTLE connection, which is very range-limited, and more likely to flake out the further away from the transceiver that the Launch is.
Whether or not FunExpander is suitable for doing that, I couldn’t say. Haven’t used it.
I wouldn’t worry too much about it, really. There seem to be many more OSR2 and, especially, Handy users these days rather than Launch users. Make the script for the toy(s) you have, and if you get requests to tweak it, you can give that a shot.
I note that Handy cannot do a full stroke at more than 400mm/s, but he can do more than 400 in a limited short range. i think Handy in a short move like 25 or 10 points can move about 500 or 600 mm/s,
the new firmware also makes a really good “vibrator” doing super short moves like 30 milliseconds, if you do a lot of dots like every 5 milliseconds the device actually stops playing