Bard_the_Bowman

Most of the parts are useless if you're going for anything with much torque. There's all kinds of builds out there that re-use the FFB2 gimbal (often combining 2 into one unit), but IMHO none of those are adequate for a real, quality stick with good force. However, the board itself is another story. If you're like me and you're handier with a soldering iron than you are with a code editor, then the board itself is a fantastic resource for building your own stick. If you look farther up this thread you'll see some posts of mine regarding my FFB2 build. I think I've pushed the FFB2 board probably farther than anyone else has in terms of current, at least farther than anyone I'm aware of. And you could push it even farther with a breakout board and discrete P and N mosfets instead of the little P/N mosfet pairs it uses. I do know that there is one other guy who has actually done a breakout board like that, although I think my build pushes more current than his. Anyway, the FFB2 board is a very good piece of hardware that can withstand some severe modifications. Here's a link to a Reddit post I made with some photos and description of the build. https://www.reddit.com/r/hoggit/comments/py7525/ive_seen_some_love_for_the_microsoft_sidewinder/ And I've got various posts up above about it. If you are interested in doing an FFB2 build I would be happy to get you a parts list and help with any questions you might have. I have spent many many hours learning about modifications to the FFB2. I keep meaning to make a dedicated thread to function as an easy "FFB2 Reference Guide," with the details of my own build and with links to many other good builds I have seen. But have not got around to it yet. But I'm happy to answer questions.

It may be an alignment issue. the two gimbal arms have to be aligned almost perfectly to get smooth operation. and even so I will get very minor "clunks" from time to time.

My concern with using centering springs to “help” the motors would be trimming. Depending how your aircraft is trimmed the motors may end up fighting the springs. Also, it would make the stick not work very well for helicopters at all for much the same reason. I agree with all this. Having a very large metal gimbal that the roll axis rides on is the way to go imo. If I ever replace my propeler-gimbal ffb2 frankenstick, I’m probably going to use this method, possibly direct drive.

That build looks very interesting. And would have excellent axis separation. It is a little complex and took me a minute to look through it and parse out what all the mechanisms are doing, but I think it's quite ingenious and could use mainly off-the-shelf parts. On that topic, are the metal plates attached to the linkages something that already exists? Or would they need to be custom cut? They almost look like random 3D printer braces to me.

Have you tested your hoverboard build yet? I am very curious how that turned out.

I think you’d have to spend a quite large amount of money for it to have enough force to be a significant safety issue. But yes you would probably want to have an easily accessible emergency kill switch like most direct drive racing wheels do. this is the mosfet I used: https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/vishay/sqj500aep-t1_ge3/?qs=jHkklCh7amiGIJk8viCi1A%3D%3D&countrycode=US&currencycode=USD did not end up needing Schottky diodes like the traditional quad-power mod. I did add some capacitors as per that mod tho. That mosfet is probably about as good as it gets for surface mount P-N arrays. If a person wanted to use even more powerful motors than my Glenteks you would need to do a breakout board with discrete P and N channel mosfets. Would actually be fairly easy to do I think. And there’s at least one guy who apparently has tried the breakout board approach successfully, albeit probably unnecessarily. Cause if he’d used my mosfets he’d have been fine as his motors draw less current than mine.

Where did you find those images? Those look like very interesting designs. But yes, I imagine suitable motors are probably pretty expensive because generally between (1) cheap (2) powerful and (3) small you can only pick two choices. Although like I said earlier, I think only ONE of them would necessarily need to be expensive. Because the stationary one could be arbitrarily big assuming you design the case around it lol

Has anyone considered trying to design a direct-drive FFB stick? Now that I'm mostly done with Frankenstick, naturally I am thinking toward the future. I'm not sure whether motors with high enough size to performance ratio are easily available or not, but it seems like a direct-drive setup would allow for a drastically simpler gimbal design that could be made with all-metal components with relatively simple fabrication skills. basically you'd only have two main components, a pitch axis driven by a stationary motor, and on that pitch axis would be mounted the stick and a roll motor, which would be free to move with the pitch axis. Would probably be easier to draw it than explain it. But I think that theoretically that could be a very simple design with very few moving parts compared to belt driven designs that need a complicated gimbal. And obviously the pitch motor would be doing more work since it has to move not only the stick but also the roll motor, but I think that could be easily overcome, because since the pitch motor is stationary you can use one of arbitrary size. Also I think such a design could result in very good axis separation with barely any cross-talk.

Here's some photos of my propeler-gimbal FFB2 frankenstick, I realized I've never actually posted any here. More at : https://imgur.com/a/jKs44Ma I still haven't got around to doing a write-up. But long story short I improved upon existing FFB2 mods by locating some very good mosfets that can handle a lot of power, and on pitch axis which is stronger I'm pulling about 8 amps vs. about 0.7 for the factory motors. I used Glentek servomotors which are excellent and have virtually no cogging.

I really want to know if propeler has tested that latest build! Such a tease to waltz in here, drop that pic and leave lmao

Oh myyyyy. That is a thing of beauty! Have you tested it? How much force are you getting? Are the motors smooth enough? That is just beautiful

Turns out I think I just didn’t have my bed and nozzle heat totally tuned right before. Printed again and the blocks are basically dimensionally perfect. Bearings pressed in very nicely. This filament is difficult and needs just the right settings apparently.

Onto what design? How to do that depends entirely on the overall form factor of your build I suppose. For me with my housing I built, it will be a matter of using narrower belts and using every tiny little bit of space I have lmao. Might have to space the power supply out a little further. And I’ve decided to leave pitch alone at this point, my pitch motor is an absolute unit and after spending some actual flight time with it I’m content with pitch force. But the roll motor either needs replaced or reduced

No I haven’t calibrated, but parts I have printed have been remarkably close to spec. I got very lucky with my Ender 3 Pro and it seems to be remarkably accurate overall without calibration. For example the main bearings fit on the gimbal arms perfectly with no major issues at all. I think that my impact-heavy pressing strategy was probably the biggest issue. This filament has incredible tensile strength but based on my testing does seem to be fairly vulnerable to strong impact force. So I think that if I carefully use a press next time and make sure that any imperfections in the print are sanded away, it should be fine. I also printed some reinforcement parts* that I superglued onto the cracking blocks, and I think I might add those straightaway this time as an additional measure. *Note that the paper-board reinforcement on the right side lower block in the picture is not what I’m referring to here, that was something I slapped on the lower block real quick as a preventative measure.

Also Propeler I want to thank you for creating this amazing forum thread. This is like a flight stick force feedback Renaissance happening in here. And your gimbal design is a work of art (the cracking on mine is only because I got hasty with installing the bearings, not a problem with your design). I had started designing my own gimbal but found this thread and decided not to re-invent the wheel. Glad to finally be posting in here instead of just lurking lol. Have you ever thought about starting a Discord server? I know there are some for racing wheel projects and it might be neat to start one for FFB flight hardware. I would be happy to start one if you all have any interest. I help run a fairly large Elite Dangerous discord server so I should be able to set one up easily if there is interest.