I’ve recently been toying with the idea of getting a button box but decided first to see what was available for a tablet/phone. After some extensive Internet searching, I narrowed it down to either:
ROCCAT Power Grid (iOS or Android) - https://en.roccat.org/Support/Product/ROCCAT-Power-Grid-5 with a good example of what can be done here: https://www.isrtv.com/forums/topic/16516-baileys-motec-button-box-using-free-roccat-power-grid-app/
or
MATRIC (Android only) - https://matricapp.com with some examples here: https://community.matricapp.com/
Both do the job but, as I had an old Android tablet doing nothing, I opted for MATRIC for a few reasons. Power Grid is designed for portrait orientation and the only way to get it to work successfully on a landscape screen is to design all the button tops as graphics rotated 90 degrees so that they’re appear correctly orientated when viewed on a landscape screen. For Apple users, it’s worth noting that it hasn’t been updated for a number of years and doesn’t work on the latest versions of iOS and iPadOS. MATRIC, on the other hand, works equally well in portrait or landscape and is still being updated. Both apps have a free version which limits you to the amount of buttons or number of pages you can use. However, both are very inexpensive to upgrade. With Roccat you pay for each additional page of buttons you want to add. With MATRIC, you pay once to upgrade to the premium version which gives you unlimited buttons and pages plus a number of other extra features. In MATRIC, the buttons are easy to design in the PC component of the software..
I’m using MATRIC on a cheap 7” Amazon Fire tablet (£35 on Black Friday) which I’ve hacked to work with the Google Play Store which is needed to download the app - by default it can only access Amazon’s much more limited App Store. I use a 7x4 grid of buttons which fits the screen well and gives me plenty of functions. You can use it as a simple hotkey device to send keystrokes to the game or program buttons with macros for more complex operation. The bottom line is that it works very well as long as you don’t need rotary controls and it’s quick and easy to make button layouts for any Android tablet or phone. If you can’t justify the cost of a decent button box and have an Android device, MATRIC is a very functional, inexpensive alternative.
As an aside, the 7” Fire tablet also makes a good, cheap colour screen to display SimHub dashes.
ROCCAT Power Grid (iOS or Android) - https://en.roccat.org/Support/Product/ROCCAT-Power-Grid-5 with a good example of what can be done here: https://www.isrtv.com/forums/topic/16516-baileys-motec-button-box-using-free-roccat-power-grid-app/
or
MATRIC (Android only) - https://matricapp.com with some examples here: https://community.matricapp.com/
Both do the job but, as I had an old Android tablet doing nothing, I opted for MATRIC for a few reasons. Power Grid is designed for portrait orientation and the only way to get it to work successfully on a landscape screen is to design all the button tops as graphics rotated 90 degrees so that they’re appear correctly orientated when viewed on a landscape screen. For Apple users, it’s worth noting that it hasn’t been updated for a number of years and doesn’t work on the latest versions of iOS and iPadOS. MATRIC, on the other hand, works equally well in portrait or landscape and is still being updated. Both apps have a free version which limits you to the amount of buttons or number of pages you can use. However, both are very inexpensive to upgrade. With Roccat you pay for each additional page of buttons you want to add. With MATRIC, you pay once to upgrade to the premium version which gives you unlimited buttons and pages plus a number of other extra features. In MATRIC, the buttons are easy to design in the PC component of the software..
I’m using MATRIC on a cheap 7” Amazon Fire tablet (£35 on Black Friday) which I’ve hacked to work with the Google Play Store which is needed to download the app - by default it can only access Amazon’s much more limited App Store. I use a 7x4 grid of buttons which fits the screen well and gives me plenty of functions. You can use it as a simple hotkey device to send keystrokes to the game or program buttons with macros for more complex operation. The bottom line is that it works very well as long as you don’t need rotary controls and it’s quick and easy to make button layouts for any Android tablet or phone. If you can’t justify the cost of a decent button box and have an Android device, MATRIC is a very functional, inexpensive alternative.
As an aside, the 7” Fire tablet also makes a good, cheap colour screen to display SimHub dashes.
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