Pots - what do you use them for?

Curious, what do people use pots for? With mwm raising the potential of being able to swap out a switch for a pot, I'm wracking my brain trying to think of a situation where a pot would be useful; thoughts? Plane, heli, multi, yacht, ...?
Maybe for controlling winches on a yacht?
If put to a dedicated virtual channel, could it be used as a multiplication source for quickly tweaking throw percentages on a maiden flight?
Camera gimbal control?

Just trying to decide whether to plan for a pot install from the start, or stick to a switch install. Will have to check measurements, the stuff I have on hand may actually be the same thread diameter anyway.

...or for easy trim a fixed wing (maiden)
E.g.... if there are split flaps like on a BF109, you speed down but you generate some lift too.
To compensate this you must push the elevator a small amount to keep the nose down.
Mostly you like to have this on a mixer and to find the right angle a pot is more easy to use than
a digital trim for that.

A few I have seen or used:
Camera gimbal, up to 3-way, pitch, tilt and yaw (also suitable for sprayer, searchlight, or other loadout)
Camera focus or zoom
Servo gains adjustments
PID (gyro) adjustments
Flight controller in-flight fine tuning (APM auto tune, other tweaks)

I am sure there are more!

Besides the gimbal controls mentioned here, I use one for controlling the sensitivity of the stagility mode on the blade 200 & 350 QX. This lets me have it be anything from an auto-leveling agility mode to a "flip" mode that just kicks in at full cyclic.

I'm not a big fan of dual rates on copters, but some of the RTF quads have transmitters that use a pot to control the rate instead of buttons to switch between fixed rates. I set that up on deviation as an exercise, but haven't actually used it.

Larger helis - especially liquid fueled ones - often use two knobs for hover pitch and throttle settings, allowing fine tuning of those.

On 3-servo rc yachts that use separate servos for the jib and main sails, you want a stick to control them simultaneously and a second control to adjust the difference between them. A knob - or even trims! - is better than any of the sticks. What's commonly considered the best option is a slider on the back of the Tx underneath your fingertips.

For high-end multirotors with many (meaning more than 3) flight modes, you ought to be able to set up an N-way rotary knob that changes the analog input value, and then set your FC software up to use that to switch flight modes using one channel.

mwm wrote: Besides the gimbal controls mentioned here, I use one for controlling the sensitivity of the stagility mode on the blade 200 & 350 QX. This lets me have it be anything from an auto-leveling agility mode to a "flip" mode that just kicks in at full cyclic.

This is a great idea and the same exact function could be gotten out of cleanflight using "adjustments" on your horizon mode gains and setting "slot1" (or whatever slot you were going to use) as the POT's channel.


You an also use adjustments to dial your rates and your PID gains in cleanflight to! I've actually put a video on youtube of doing this on Devo (in the video I simply setup the POT as a 3-way switch but you could definitely set it up as a input dial that directly controls the gain (you probably could have in 1.9 too but I didnt know how to directly use a channels value then lol).

mwm wrote: You ought to be able to set up an N-way rotary knob that changes the analog input value, and then set your FC software up to use that to switch flight modes using one channel.

Mike, you said somewhere else recently that you'd managed to get a beep-on-centre happening, wonder if it would be possible to extend that into a beep-on-change of a pseudo n-position rotary?
That could actually be quite a powerful tool, a pot that can turn into a however-many-positions-you-desire (within reason) switch
You've really got to stop volunteering yourself for these things!

RoGuE_StreaK wrote: Mike, you said somewhere else recently that you'd managed to get a beep-on-centre happening, wonder if it would be possible to extend that into a beep-on-change of a pseudo n-position rotary?

It'll already do that. It's actually "beep on value", where the value is whatever is computed by the mixer. Exactly how you do it would depend on how the the rotary is set up, and you're liable to need one mixer for each rotary position. Since the beep value computation can use a different src than the mixer input, you might be able to do something clever to reduce the mixer count.