Hempstead

I use two pieces of marble slabs. You know, those ones used for making pie crust (not cheap, mind you!). One on the front to weight down the front metal lip and prevent it from sliding forward. One on the rear (in reference to the aircrafts) to weigh down the rear metal lip to prevent it from tipping over and to boost the floor height by about 1" for my heels. After I praised the TPR, I feel obliged to tell you what I think the two solvable problems with TPR. The trouble is that the TPR pedal height is about 3.5" center to floor (the axel center height). F16 has about 2.5". So, TPR is slightly too high, even for a reclined sitting situation. It's good for if you were lying down in a pit with a highly reclined ejection seat a foot from the floor, with a pair of USAF issued boots which boosts your heel height... but if you are sitting in an office chair... your leg angle is way too steep, and you are bare footed on carpet.... both factors reduce the effective height of your heels and makes it quite uncomfortable. So, that extra 1" thick of marble slab made a huge difference for me. Plus, this kind of marble slab is very smooth but not mirror slick, great for sliding the heels on it when maneuvering aggressively, much better than carpet. Moreover, I don't want my carpet to have two bare threaded "pedal tracks." Even though TPR has the provision to adjust the angle of the pedals to suit office chair sitting situation, it's, nevertheless, not very good. The trouble here is that at that angle, you would have to lift your heels off the floor in order to reach for the toe brakes and press down (our feet have surprisingly little range of motion for tiling up and down, about 45 to 50 degree only), but there is no provision for heel support. So, your feet are kind of dangling half in the air with no reference, making centering very difficult unless you have strong springs to center it for you. And the dangling half is where the gravity is pulling down on your whole lower leg. Not good ergonomics. I prefer to fly with my heels on the floor, thus giving me a relative location reference for fine adjustments. So, I usually fly with my toes on the pedals and heels on the floor. 3.5" is way too high for that when sitting on a high office chair (awkward foot angle). When making large movement, I move my heels. But for fine adjustment, I tilt my feet without moving my heels. And I only put my heel off the floor and reach for the toe brakes when I am landing or taxiing. Hey, 99% of time I am in the air, not on the ground. So, I favor the solution that give me better in the air performance. After all... most of the aircrafts are like swans... they only waddle badly on the ground, particularly the F16s with its narrow wheel base. I am sure somebody could easily design and print a heel support for it. I, myself, don't want heel supports. I want my heels on the floor, a boosted floor, or the pedal height should have been lower, much lower. If I had to guess... I would guess the heel support was cut for cost saving. Things like that are always tempting targets for cost saving measures. Moreover, if you look at the aluminum arms where the pedals axels are attached to, you would see some casted features that currently have no function.... but they look like stops and notches for attaching some kind of heel support option. These... probably some would argue that it's a personal taste... kind of... but they really are ergonomic design issues that aren't solved. The reason I said that is that for an office chair sitting, you need to tilt the pedal angle down to fit the range of motion of our feet (TM did that), and either design in heel support, or lower the pedal height (probably to about 1" for heel on floor). But if you want your pedals to support both reclined sitting and office chair situations, you probably would be wise to make the height adjustable (say make it 1" high, but supply a couple of cheap booster blocks), and make the heel support a detachable option. TM did neither. So, IMHO, it's a design miss, but also possibly a business decision miss. But they can be easily redheck'd. So, not a big problem. You know, if I can't easily cut the pedal height down... I can boost the floor height for my heels!

Try Lee Spring online.... tons of in stock springs... but, for small quantity, the markups is quite high, and the s/h is another killer. Or you can just make some springs with piano wires. This type of tension spring is very easy to make... a mandrel plus a cordless drill, and some simple wooden jig will do just fine.

Center is pretty good. I haven't opened it yet. But AFAIK, they still advertise the H.E.A.R.T system, i.e. MLX90316/MLX90333 run under a 3-wire SPI mode. So is the TFRP. The toe brakes look like some linear sensor. Don't know what they are. Could be just some simple linear POTs, could be some linear Hall sensors, could be magnetic linear POTs. Don't know. Anyway, the main response curve is linear, no dead center, no sticktion I can detect (shouldn't have much as it's pretty much a parallelogram mechanism, so only poor bearing/sleeve quality could mess that up). At center, fine adjustment is only limited by the centering force generated by two springs with an adjustable mechanism. If you are flying choppers, you really don't want too much centering force. So, unless you add damper(s), there should be no sticktion to hamper your fine adjustment (the main reason I ditched TFRP). You can use one spring, or two springs. And the fine adjustment can be done with thumb screws (IMHO, superfluous, as I can't feel the difference with the bottom of my bare feet with the range of the adjustment, but some might like it). One spring vs two spring, however, makes a huge difference. Since the two springs are exposed outside of the "casing", you can easily replace them.

TPR has pretty much a linear force response curve. It's basically a parallelogram design with half of the parallelogram folded to sit in the back of the tower. It still has a central torsion spring reacting to rotation of a pivot bar. So, linear to the rotational angle.

I have posted this before (not with the STL file). It's just a simple 3D printed PLA adapter for the Wilcox NVG adapter (the lip of the helmet on the front does need to be cut a little for the Q2 to slid closer to your eyes (just cut it as high as you could without cutting into the NVG adapter on the helmet; you do have to take out the padding right inside before cutting), but nothing a scroll saw couldn't handle, if you just buy the el'cheapo plastic helmet for Airsoft, instead the very expensive combat version made with Kevlar. I can use this for hours. Sure, there is some light leaks... not that I mind much... you can always put some black cloth bag over it; problem solved. Currently, a clone aluminum Wilcox adapter sells for about USD $100, and a cheap helmet about $30 on Amazon. So, it's $130 plus a little elbow grease vs Elite strap's $49 which kind of works but not really well. Attached is the zip file with the adapter's STL file. I hereby put it in the public domain. Do whatever you want with it. I don't give a rat's mule. Please note that you should print it with a 0.4mm nozzle. PLA will do just fine... no need for tough PLA, or Nylon, or ABS, or any exotic carbon fiber filament. Also, I would recommend that you print it with the flat side of the spine down on the print bed so to avoid delamination of the dovetail where the concentration of force is, and less support material needed. It's designed to be printed this way. Print it in any other orientation, and it might fail. In this version, I had gotten rid of the holes on the body. They don't save much material, nor save much print time, and waste a lot of breakaway support material and a lot more post processing works to get rid of them. A 40% infill with no holes will do just as well. I also put a tennis racket grip tape on the Q2 to protect it from scratches from the printed adapter. In addition, I have replaced the rubber band with a flexible cord similar to the ones on the helmet in the picture. A shoe lace would do just great too. Let me know if you want the original Solidworks file for modifications (exceeds the 5MB attachment size limit of the forum). NVGWilcoxLock2.STL.zip

They are both JoyZ but from different devices. I know, it's confusing, but a lot of game GUIs don't display which devices it comes from. That includes MSFS 2020, Elite Dangerous, DCS, and even BattleField games. However, underneath the games do record the devices:control tuples. If you bind them by using the button/key presses, you'd be fine. But if you use drop down list... that could be confusing... Brevity is a good thing, but not at the expense of clarity!

I would suggest drilling a tiny hole on the stick body at the location of the clip, a hole just big enough for a paper clip. It’s not dissimilar to the mechanical SIM card ejection “hole.” TM should have designed that in.

Yep. That JS5208 is the one I am using as well for F16/A10 thumb CMS switch where my new all optical 8-way won’t fit. It has one attribute that is much better than every other 8-way switch on the market I know of — the stem is reasonably long enough to get some thumb cap to attach to it. All others are stupidly short, like 1mm long nubs. So short that even superglue has trouble sticking to it for long term, as stupid as the Thrustmaster nub. Funny enough though. My inability to find an 8-way that does not just have a stupid nub, over the years, was one of the reasons that drove me to start thinking about designing my own. Then it progressed to, if I were going to bother with designing my own, I am gonna design one that has no electrical bounce, and solve that problem the soft debouncer in Hempstick couldn’t solve, once and for all. And the optical 8-way was started because I couldn’t resolve the pushbutton problem for my Hall Mini Stick design in my bronze cast F16 TQS. So I thought, If I could solve the pushbutton problem for the 8-way, I could back port it to the Mini Hall Stick. A chain of events all sparked by those stupid nubs! I blame that guy who designed that little red stick on IBM Stinkpad keyboard!

Yeah, George is a huge problem w/o IFF. I have been killing Abram tanks b/c of it. Then I started playing Hammer campaign, killing more friendly Abrams. So, I stopped killing “Tank?” on George’s list. And then I kept getting killed by T72’s anti-tank laser guided rounds. No warning, no nothing, just bam, and dead. I had to find how I died by reviewing the event log after the game. George w/o IFF in combination with no laser warning is awful.

Something like this? 100% home made. But please note that this project has gone through 5 complete redesign, over the past 13 years. Even I myself couldn't wait for it and bought TM's TPR b/c I wanted to fly F16 and F18, and AH64 now, not next year. However, I am rather sure there will be no major redesign, as the main mechanism is working very well -- I have completely resolved the torque binding of the linear ball bearing problem that had been plaguing me for the last 10 years, once and for all. What's missing are: 1. The new Hempstick Pico to be able to drive the industrial servo motor and serve as an USB controller. 2. Force sensing toe brakes. Some partial prototypes in progress. 3. prototype the new pivot-bar-less modification. The picture is a bit old... the new modification has no central pivot bar... one less thing to make with milling machine. That reduced the parts requiring milling machine to a big fat zero (although a CNC milling machine would be nice to have in the manufacturing process). The designed force for the main axis is about 40 lbf, toe brake, 20 lbf. And NO FFB! Don't ask. I refuse to support FFB. It's possible to get it to work if you get rid of the motor and no toe brake, and put in spring centering, and other controllers, like the original Hempstick, or whatever other controllers. Obviously, I am not into that. It's a nice to have feature if I could cramp it in, but will be ditched in a heart bit if my main design conflict with it.

Core i9 7900X, 10 core RTX3080 32GB Oculus Q2 Able to run F16/F18 at 45 fps stable, except explosions and at carrier, device at 90Hz, max resolution but, AH64, 22fps to 8fps Reduced Oculus Q2 to the low recommended resolution, fps no change, still 22fps to 8fps, nausea inducing, unplayable. Update: I up the Q2 device resolution back to max, 90Hz... and changed DCS's general settings to VR preset. I was able to get wildly swinging fps between 8 and 30 fps, but mostly at around 30 fps, on the ground. Did a cold start... and then flew up... once I am up at around 200 ft agl, my fps returned to about stable 45 fps. So, it's definitely stuff on the ground causing the fps drop. Perhaps remove those fuel truck, guys with M4 standing guards and got killed by my landing (I forgot to bind the toe brakes so I mowed him over)? However, this thing has the tendency of swinging left and right slightly. I am no chopper pilot, not sure if this is normal.

Email Thrustmaster support. They will most likely sell you a replacement switch. TM is well-known for selling spare parts to extend your high end controller life span, unlike some other vendors.

Oh, whatever, screw it... Here it is. These three attached files are hereby published in the public domain. Do whatever you want with it. Note that the text is supposed to be about 0.915" to 0.1" high, or about 6.5pts to 7.2pts. I drew the "right" size... but it looked "funny." So I reduced the size to make the text look "better" but obviously undersized a bit. Anyway, don't count on the text size too much. They are very difficult to measure the correct size, unless you know your "fontography" in and out, and know where to measure. So, I often measure it roughly and adjust by how they "feel." Moreover, if you have enough authentic panels in your hand, you will soon realize the same thing I realized -- they don't all use the same font/size... In case you are wondering. The font I used, no surprise, is Gordon URW Condensed (GordonURWCond.otf/.ttf). TrimCacBody.SLDPRT TrimCap.SLDPRT TrimTop.SLDPRT Trim.SLDASM

2 or 3 degree rotation is Normal. Just don’t over tighten the stick to base. The plastic thread could bind onto the pot metal nut. So, when you next try to loosen the nut, you could break the internal anti-rotation plastic ball.

Ha! It ALWAYS happens that way, not just to you! Starts simple and snow balls from there.

A PVC pipe? Seriously, my first thought was 3D print a collar. But then a PVC pipe with a cut notch for the wire came to my mind in 10 seconds. But finding a PVC pipe with the exact dimension would be too good to be true, so why not make something like a ring cap on the top and bottom to cap fill the gap? 3D print would be nice, paper mache would work, a 2 layer cardboard disks glued together would be child play. You just want to keep dust out, right?

It’s not that bad. I even used it for mining in Elite Dangerous, that tedious bit of grind, placed on my desk. You just have hold your stick lightly instead of death grip like a lot of noobs would. Death grip would indeed make you “feel” the wrong angle. But I have to admit that I bought two sets of TM flying clamps for it in a side stick configuration (for both F16 and F18, and no the center is occupied by Boeing yoke).

Nope, not that Gordon. It's Gordon URW. This one, https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/urw/gordon/ I am sure you can try that free Gordon. It's close too. As long as you are consistent on all panels, nobody will be able to tell unless they put a real panel right next to yours. Even my real F16 panel use different fonts, see the picture of my two Oxygen panels. '-' like in the screenshot below? I actually opened MS33558 font file with Fontographer on my old old old machine before its harddrive died, and there weren't any non-alphanumeric chars in there. As you can see below. Helvetica Neue Light is close, but a bit too "big and wide", but it's not unlike the Oxygen panel on top. Reducing the size might fool the unwary. And on some of the panels, I actually had to use Gordon URW Condensed Regular to get that "squeezed" look to fit the text in the space. That.... I can't find equivalent in any other font other than Gordon URW.

Indeed it cannot be MS33558, b/c ICP has a non-alphanumeric character, ‘-‘. See here, https://www.hempstick.org/The_Official_Hempstick_Site/F16_Landing_Gear_Panel.html, for my findings. In short, try Gordon font (commercial product.) Note that, I don’t have a real ICP panel. That 3D model Ranma13 used was modeled by Kumrik. However, from all the real F16 panels I have on my shelf, I can take a good guess that Gordon font will do you good. .

$142, USD? Mind you, Amazon is selling it for USD$299! I pre-ordered and paid something like $225. My only gripe was it’s too expensive for a plastic body stick. I would be happier if it were about USD $150. Guess you got a good deal.

That problem has been there since the Cougar days. It's caused by poor tolerance in manufacturing using the cheap pot metal casting method/material (more difficult to have tight tolerance for such cheap metal casting than proper metal like aluminum alloy) even with post machining. Sometimes, the shaft is just a tad smaller in diameter than the hole in the grip shell. The root cause is really a slight design problem -- you need to consider your material and manufacturing method when making design decisions. That shaft and shell connection mechanism is not a stellar design decision, although a good enough one for mass produced commercial products. I mean, no big deal, the fix is easy enough. I usually fix it with the traditional method... news paper shimming. Just open it up and shim it with some layers of news paper, or some tennis racket grip tape, and screw it back on. I recently fixed my F18 stick this way. Be careful though. Because it's pot metal (or plastic in F18 grip's case), it's very easy to strip the threads (and your threads might have already been stripped) so don't over tighten the screws. If that happened, you have two choices -- 1. thread inserts, and 2. use a stainless steel pipe clamp like somebody else on this forum posted (sorry, I am too lazy to hunt down the referenced posting, but my #include <disclaimer.h> here is valid -- I didn't come up with pipe clamp idea), or use a support bracket like the one MAXCenna mentioned.

https://github.com/JonahTsai/F16/tree/master/BasicPanels That’s a pair of Solidworks files based on MS25212.

I used to do 120Hz, max resolution set in Q2 device, with my RTX3080, and turn PD=1.0. It's workable... but you will never get 120 fps... but I wasn't shooting for 120Hz, I was only hoping for 120 / 2 = 60Hz (notice there is no 60Hz option; so this is my way of doing 60Hz). The trouble with using the default 72Hz is that you often get locked down to 36Hz, with plenty of GPU cycles available. With 90Hz... you get trimmed down to 45Hz, most of the time. With 120Hz, I was able to get beyond 45Hz... a lot of times at 50+ but never beyond 60Hz. However, I question the utility of fluctuating 50+Hz against stable 45Hz. Seriously, I can't tell the difference, particularly with ASW set to auto. So, for now, I am doing 90Hz, with device resolution bumped up to about 1.2X, and DCS PD=1 with MSAA 4x. I get quite stable 45Hz (except when there are a lot of explosions etc. like from GBU-105), and my GPU utilization is somewhere north of 75%.

Not just that... I don't know about you, with AirLink everything look fuzzy to me.

Well, at least OP was able to return to cockpit view. I got another problem with F10 with my Oculus Q2. Since the recent update of Open Beta, F10 seems lagging and even not responding to mouse and touch controller input. It seems to be so laggy in F10 that even zooming the map doesn’t work. But, if it did respond, it took like a second or two to zoom in or out, making it completely unusable. I mean, imagine human induced oscillation remote controlling a buggy on the moon from earth. And it got so bad that F1 did not work in map, but F2, F3, etc. did work. And since I couldn’t get back to cockpit view, I was forced to kill dcs.exe eventually. I have not tried if this happens in 2D yet.