Alterscape

Awesome, thanks UIV. Just heard back from someone, but she thought I was asking for the "machine screw + wedges" connector used to hold the grip on the connector. Do you know the name for the connector we're talking about, in your inventory? I described it as best I could, hoping for better luck now!

UIV, an email I sent to sales-en@vkb-sim.pro bounced back with a "no such user" error. Can you please check on that address?

Replying to this to include the solution: as per https://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=3362931&postcount=279 So, problem solved! Next step, finding a way to re-apply this mod after patch with eg: OGSME.

UIV, thank you! how can I buy the connector alone? I didn't see it on vkbcontrollers.com or the vkb aliexpress store. Definitely interested in this, and willing/able to solder.

The VKB modern combat grip has a flip-up trigger that's physically similar to the real Ka-50. By default, it acts like as a held button when flipped up (ie: trigger up = button 24 pressed; trigger down = no buttons; trigger pulled = button 3 pressed). The Ka-50 inputs only have a "toggle cannon/weapons mode" bind -- It's 'C' by default, and pressing it toggles between the cannon and primary weapons. Is there a Lua or njoy32 config trick to synchronize the simulator flip trigger with the physical trigger on the MCG pro?

Also interested in this -- have a Gunfighter Mk2 with MCG Pro. Would like to fabricobble an adapter between the MCG Pro and a Sidewinder FFB2, for Black Shark (Force trim!). My current plan is to purchase another Gunfighter stick extension and remove the metal tube, running the 3-wire connection from the MCG Pro to the Gunfighter base (while the MCG is physically sitting on the FFB2 stalk). But if there's an easier/simpler way to get my hands on the MCG Pro connector and a pinout for the 4-pin connector on the blackbox, I'll take it!

DeadMeat, did you measure the current draw of the solenoid by any chance? Working on a PCB to drive one of these (but waiting for all the bits to arrive in the post), and want to make sure I'm designing with appropriate FETs and so forth.

I don't want to rag on it too hard -- high-res small screens are a big problem right now, and it's about as good as the Vive, but with peripheral vision. I don't want to put people off it, it's just focusing on improving a different axis (FOV) than the Vive Pro, which is all about angular res. Also keep in mind I'm relating subjective experience from a 2-minute experience with a single demo. I don't want to make too many hard claims. I really liked it to be honest, but I want higher-res screens -- maybe that ridiculously high-res LG screen Google has talked about will come through for next gen HMDs..

Got to try one of these at SIGGRAPH last week. The lines for the StarVR booth were insane and I had real work to do, so I found a demo unit at an engineering visualization firm's booth and sat through the sales pitch for a chance to try it on. Initial impressions: Holy FOV, Batman! My first "real" VR headset experience was a Fakespace Wide5 at an old job. The Wide5 is infamous for having one of the largest FOVs in VR, but at the cost of a price in the high five figures for the HMD/FPGA box -- the guy who designed and built the lenses did them one at a time in a small shop, and they're fiendishly clever. Also fiendishly expensive. You get 150+ degree FOV, at the cost of relatively low contrast and high weight. The StarVR set is close to that FOV, though! I noticed some artifacts from the fresnel in the periphery, but nothing horrible, and contrast was great! The panels are only a bit higher-res than the Vive Pro's, and the pixels are spread out over much more space in your field of view, so angular resolution is probably on par with the OG Vive, if not slightly worse. Sadly, the type of foveated rendering they're talking about can't fix this -- you can save time by rendering lower-resolution in the periphery (in practice this means one image pixel goes to several device pixels), but you can't create extra device pixels where there are none. I want to see these optics with 8k panels and the driver/engine smarts to drive them, though! In the short term I think increasing angular resolution (ie, being able to discern smaller text, indicators, and objects) is more important to the seated simulator experience than FOV, but I am looking forward to all of this coming together! I am not sure if the demo I saw had foveated rendering up and running or not. Framerates were reasonable -- pretty sure I was hitting 45, if not 90, the whole time in the engineering demo. I saw a few hitches but I'm not sure how much to blame the HMD and how much to blame lighthouse tracking on a tradeshow floor filled with lighthouses, or the demo I was looking at (which was not really intended for the HMD, and likely not at all optimized). So apparently the Oculus Half-Dome prototype has a driven, sliding screen that works with an eye-tracker to produce the correct effects for accommodation (the way your eyes change focus when you look at objects at different distances). High-res panels, wide FOV optics, proper accommodation, and enough GPU compute to drive the whole mess running applications I want to run = holy grail of simulation. We might just get there!

I am planning to buy a Gunfighter II / MCG Pro base for DCS, once they become available in the States again (fingers crossed for 9 JUL). I'm buying the gunfighter II base + extension (and WH conversion kit) for use with all the fighters. However, one of my hopes is to use the MCG Pro with the Ka-50 module, and I am waaaay too invested in force feedback on that platform to give it up. Ideally I'd tear down one of my FFB2 sticks, machine a base that allows the MCG Pro to sit on top of the FFB2 stalk, and then run a cable from the MCG's connector to the blackbox. So my question is: Can the MCG Pro communicate with the Blackbox if connected directly via a cable, without the Gunfighter II base in line? Looks like there is a 4-pin connector between the stick base and grip, but a 3-pin connector on the newer MCGs? Understand 100% if VKB does not want to describe the communications protocol, in which case I guess the fallback option would be to construct an extension cable from the MCG plug to the Gunfighter II (similar to what goes in the stick extension -- buying a second stick extension kit might just be the ticket here)! I could then bind the FFB2 axes (and ignore the Gunfighter x/y in DCS) and get what I'm looking for.. Understand that all of the above is likely a warranty-voiding activity, but I void warranties for grins anyway! :)

I don't have physical hardware to examine, but I believe that if it's compatible with the WH base, it should be compatible with the Cougar base. The internals of these things are really simple -- just some parallel-to-serial shift registers! WH grips are mostly compatible with Cougar base (except the 'z'/pushbutton on the CMS hat, if I remember correctly). Since the Hornet has fewer switch positions, I believe it should be fine!

It's actually a FAQ item, heh. Please disregard this thread! In case anyone finds this and not the FAQ, there's a specific support ticket option for "BS1 + BS2 Upgrade to Full BS2." The description there instructs you to attach a screenshot of your Steam library with BS1 visible, in lieu of a BS1 key.

Yeah, but in this case Steam doesn't give me a key for BS1. Other people I know who purchased BS2 or A-10C on Steam have a "view key" option in the Steam library, but I have no such option for my Steam BS1. How were you able to negotiate this with ED, Pikey?

Apologies if this is an obvious question, but how does one get one's BS1 CD Key if one purchased BS1 through Steam? All my DCSW modules are on standalone, including the BS2 upgrade, but I bought BS1 on Steam. Totally understand if it's not possible to upgrade due to how Steam keys work (ie: I can't give up my BS1 license even if I wanted to because it's bound to Steam), but, can't hurt to ask, yes?

TrackIR, hands down. Tobii only provides 3 degrees of freedom -- pitch, roll, and yaw. It can't detect if you move your head up/down, left/right, or forwards/backwards. TrackIR (or the open-source clones, like opentrack, that use a similar IR+markers approach) can read all six axes. In my experience, you'll end up wanting this.

Thanks for sharing the pic, Deezle! A couple of questions: How long is your collective 'lever arm?" (ie, the distance to the point where you grab from the pivot) What is the angular range of the collective? I set mine up to go from level to about 45 degrees. I think I could maintain that by moving the mount point down low as in your setup -- will give it a go when I return from travel and see where I end up.

Thank you! Sadly no TechShop near me (I'm in West Los Angeles, which is basically the armpit of the tool-having-universe, as far as I can tell). Re: home shop stuff, this is all great advice, and thank you! I've taken classes in machining and done equipment fabrication work in undergrad, grad, and for work. I'm not all that skilled since I don't get a lot of practice, but I know enough to know when I need to ask for help at least! In grad school I had free run of a fairly well equipped and maintained Sherline mini mill and lathe, and also a very good welding shop; in undergrad I worked in a theater scene shop which incidentally had a fairly well equipped metal shop attached. I'm not all that skilled, since it isn't my core job function, but I know how to safely make chips and get what I want out of the machines, more or less. Anyhow, a friend with a garage shop does owe me a favor, so if I can figure out what I need to build I may head down to his place some weekend and try to bang out a solution! I mean really the answer is "live-work loft with concrete floors" but girlfriend-approval for that one's a bit tough. ;)

Thank you, FragBurn and Thadiun Okona! Both sets of advice boil down to "I should really buy machine tools" for me. I'm living in a one-bedroom apartment in a big city, so the only fabrication stuff I have easily to hand is a small 3d printer and a portable drill. I think I may just buy some aluminum plate, though, as marking and drilling is so much faster than waiting for the printer to build up a thick plastic plate with tiny holes in it (which is what you're seeing in my photos). It's easier for me to make some holes in plate than to make any sort of precise shapes, so I think I'm going to start with FragBurn's lever positioning advice, while I work on scaring myself up a lathe and a mill! FragBurn, the micro is a Teensy running a really simple sketch that reads the ADC, rescales it, and sends it as a USB game controller output. I'm sampling the ADC at 12 bit resolution and then scaling to a 10-bit value with the range of my actual lever arm, in order to lose as little precision as possible. The hall sensor I'm using has a 180 degree range and I'm only using 45 deg, so that's significant! I thought about using gears to turn the sensor input shaft physically 180 degrees as the arm moved 45 degrees, but again given my lack of precision machining equipment I suspected that would end in backlash and lack of precision. I think I'll end up building one of the DIY hall sensors instead (a Honeywell sensor and some neodymium magnets, as documented elsewhere in the forums) eventually, as that will let me do less level-converting nonsense.

FragBurn: here's an imgur gallery showing the configuration of the damper. The pivot point is behind and above the axis the collective arm pivots around. Other folks: there's some other description of how the collective is set up in the gallery as well. Reposting here for posterity: "Collective sitting on its side (don't quite have the side-table mount system stable yet -- reference orange clamp!) This is the collective in "down" position, damper fully extended. At about 45 degrees angle, the damper is fully retracted. You can't see from this side, but there is a hall effect rotary sensor attached to the slotted shaft underneath. The sensor's range is ~0.2v - 4.8v, and that's a Teensy 3.0 at right, so the mess of protoboard wiring underneath is an LM324N non-inverting op amp pdip doing impedance matching and level shifting. One of the opamps is configured as a voltage follower tracking the sensor; output of that goes through a resistor divider network to re-scale to ~0.1v-3.3v, and then into a second voltage follower (to match impedance with the Teensy ADC). I'm still getting noise from (I think) noisy 5v USB power, but hopefully I can filter that."

Certainly worth a go, mr_mojo97. My collective shaft is an aluminum tube and at this point I don't have any real mass on the end -- it's just a 3d-printed threaded bit that the heads will eventually screw onto, Warthog grip style. The head is likely to be 3d printed plastic so not very heavy. Out of curiosity would you mind measuring your Lynx collective from pivot point to grip? I eyeballed it for my design and I think I'm close but a real number would be great.

Thanks for the pointer, Thadiun Okona! I understand the "axial" loading based on your photo gallery -- can you say a bit more about the radial configuration?

I'm building a DIY collective. [edit]Photos here![/edit]I just got all the parts for the collective lever itself together for the first time, and I'm realizing that the motorcycle steering damper I'm using to provide resistance, even on the softest/least-damped setting, provides too much resistance to be comfortable, especially since I need to shorten the lever arm by a few cm (which results in even less mechanical advantage. This steering damper is what I'm using -- it's the same one Slaw recommends as a damper for his RX Vipers, which I am happily using. With no centering system and less mechanical advantage, however, even the softest setting is still too stiff. I assume attempting to modify one of these dampers is how I get hydraulic fluid all over my apartment. Even so, I definitely need something softer than this damper but less soft than "nothing." Any thoughts? Ideally I'd love to buy a similar part that's just softer, but I doubt such a thing exists at the $30USD price point of the damper above. Any input would be appreciated!

As most of you probably know, the TM Warthog uses a pair of 5-pin Mini-DIN panel mount connectors -- female on the base, male on the stick grip. The 5-pin male panel-mount connector on the stick grip is hard to source! Female panel-mount mini-din connectors are available on all the usual suspects, but that panel-mount/male connector is, based on several days of googling, un-find-able for us civilians. I'm starting to think TM commissioned a batch of them specifically for the WH. I'm hoping to build a similar interchangable grip system for the DIY collective I'm hacking on, and the TM solution of two panel-mount connectors held together physically by some additional parts, seems really smart. Hard to capitalize on that idea when one of the connectors can't be found, unfortunately. Clearly it can be done because Virpil and etc provide Warthog adapters, but any leads for small-volume purchasers?

I've had this problem intermittently with the DCS updater, finally decided to report it. Symptoms: When a DCS version update is available, the updater runs, downloads the update files, then hangs on "Shutting down the torrents," with the progress bar at around 10% (as per screenshot). I can force quit the updater and DCS launches as normal, successfully updated. This bug does not impact my use or enjoyment of DCS, but I figured it might be useful to report. autoupdate log as follows. Lots of INFO lines about updated files, then on line 6100: INFO : Installed 3000 files. STATUS: Installing runtimes... STATUS: Cleaning up... STATUS: Cleaning up... STATUS: Successfully updated to 1.5.6.1938.247 STATUS: Shutting the torrents down... INFO : Kill timer set to 30 seconds... INFO : Torrents have been shutdown in time. INFO : Kill timer reset. EOF. I have saved the file in case folks want more info.

What settings are people running for decent Vive performance these days? I think I may be CPU-bound (I tried it with the free planes on at work a while ago with a new-ish i7 (DDR4 and an nVidia 980) and got good results. My home rig is an i5-3750k @ 4.2Ghz with 24gb DDR3-1866 RAM and a 1080. I need to fiddle a bit more and make sure Asynch Reprojection is working, but even so, I was really hoping for more than 30FPS in Nevada. I'm hoping some of my problem is that I turned all the eye candy on for the 1080 and now that's hurting me, so I'm curious what you folks step your settings down to in order to get good framerates. I already disabled AA and etc. I figure I'll fiddle with it when I get home tonight, but recommendations for places to start would be great.