Add information about the physical switch type to the machine-readable documentation

[jboecker]

Consider a hypothetical glass cockpit software that uses DCS-BIOS.
Ideally, this software would display a list of available controls which the user could drag and drop onto a panel and which would work without further configuration.

It is already possible to get a list of available controls by reading the JSON files that are also used to generate the reference documentation.

However, right now these files do not contain enough information to support the above use case.
For example, when looking at the Signal Lamps Test button in the A-10C, our glass cockpit software would know it was looking at a control with two states, but it has no way of knowing whether that was a toggle switch or a push button.

Ideally, when dragging the Signal Lamps Test button onto a panel, our glass cockpit software would know it is a push button and offer the user a range of visual styles to choose from.

The following information should be available in a machine-readable format:

• Physical type of control
  • toggle switch
  • rotary switch
  • potentiometer
  • rotary encoder
  • rocker switch
• Information about momentary positions for toggle switches and rotary switches
• Information about min and max angles for rotary knobs

Some of this information is already encoded in the control_type, api_variant and physical_variant attributes. However, this is only a very first draft, very much subject to change and should not be relied upon yet.

If you are interested in such a feature, please use this issue to contribute your thoughts about what information needs to be included and how it should be encoded as JSON attributes.