Thadiun Okona

Sorry I didn't get back to you on this, but I figured out where the issue is on mine. The shaft on the printed parts (polished white sls nylon) is 15.8mm but The shaft on TM grips is actually 16. There are a few other spots that need adjustment as well and I made a scan of TM parts next to yours so you can compare the slight differences in socket proportions. http://i.imgur.com/Qg2TYXP.jpg Was going to make a simple drawing to dimension the other bits and of course I can put calipers on any parts you want. Been trying to get my molds finished.. making progress.

You can use it with whatever you want, but to use it with TARGET it only works with any combination (combined controller limited to 8 axes): Cougar (/FCS pedals) Warthog T16000m MFD panels

There are already printable versions floating around. There's a guy on the IL2 site selling replacements in bronze, and I'm in the process of working on first pewter ones, and if those do not hold up then I will make bronze ones as well. Was something I had in the works, but was beaten to the punch but it's a common problem that needs a practical solution. I've been dabbling in the relevant arts for years and am finishing up tooling for left hand Warthogs and metal articulation spheres are the next item. The resin is a uv cured resin from the SLA process. It's high resolution but extremely brittle. It's good for models or for non structural parts or as a master to mold from. The only plastic Shapeways has that's remotely suitable is the sintered nylon ('soft-flexible'), however the torque loads this part sees it's just not a job for any plastics, which are far too short in tensile and shear for the load concentrated between the corner and the pin where they all break.

Dunno, I have to contact them again and see where we're at but I'm pretty sure once they get me some they will be stocking it as well and once I test it I will likely be recommending it to folk in some cases. No one stocks it yet anywhere, which makes it pretty hard to test! Not sure if you know what I had to go through just to get Nyogel 767a back on the market, but the world supply was fully diminished (except one overpriced supplier of 100g tubes in the UK and Nye's overpriced direct option) and until I bugged a supplier enough times (took a few months) to put in an order big enough to Nye Lubricants for them to fire up the factory and make a new batch. Once that happened, MicroMark and Overready (and other sellers) were able to stock back up and have been supplying it since. Overready knew who I was by the time I contacted them about PG44a, because I'd sent so many people to their site that they started wondering why they were having trouble keeping this funny grease in stock and they were told about some joystick nut sending them there.. ..and they had already updated the wording on their site to include HOTAS as its prime use :p

The crack always propagates in the same location, the short span between the rectangular slot to the pin in the side. This plastic does not have the required shear and tensile strength to have that thin of a cross section on that part for loads the stick realistically experiences over the course of its life. Predictable/calculable things like this and the way they saw fit to release Cougar gimbals make me wonder if Thrustmaster's 'engineering dept' is an unenthusiastic guy that says 'whatever, it'll work' most of the time since they always miss the obvious outcomes like this yet commit the to the tooling to mass produce a fatal flaw. Engineering this single component to withstand reasonable loads would have added so little cost to the overall production, but here we are discussing Achilles heel. I'm working on metal ones (pewter is likely strong enough not to be the weakest link anymore and is much cheaper/easier to produce than bronze, but if I have to go that route I can), as they are the key to the twist mechanism I'm working on for Warthog, but am focusing on my left hand grips first.

I'm in contact with OverReady (almost certainly where you bought that tube), and they are going to get me some PG44a to play with. It's the super heavy version of this grease, where 767a is the regular heavy. I'll post about it when I have some to mess with.

Those little slide pots ministicks are awful... prone to spiking, deadzones developing, and undesirable kinematics to begin with. If it were a good solution manufacturers would have been cramming those cheap little things into their devices.

FFB2... best all around signal processing and pretty decent guts. For anyone wondering, it's not hard to build a FF stick, the electomechanics are pretty straight forward but without an interface to a game you have nothing. Some titles make this straight forward, others are much harder to get the parameters you need. Collaborating with Roland van Roy I've designed a tested working circuit http://www.simprojects.nl/images/FF%20idea.JPG for this and have solid designs to work with for mechanicals but it always comes back to interface why I haven't followed through. My scratch system needs to be fed airspeed data for minimum base function. Any effects beyond variable centering and trim offsets (this is most of the charm) gets into pre-scripted library effects that need individual scripting triggers (stall shakes, landing bumps, machine-gun judder etc) and making those happen is not a trivial affair and it's a black hole of hacking and tuning for every single title you want to use it with. FFB2 interfaces like a champ, so any further attempts I make with FF will be hacking that brain to run my own hardware/motors, because the brain is the hard part of this. Here's a later project Roland did hacking an MSFFB2 to beef up the drive signals to power his own hardware: http://www.simprojects.nl/ms_siderwinder_ff2_hack.htm

I think his later runs/last run were $600 but I could be misremembering but I've seen them sell for that much on ebay.

People used to pay $600 just for U2NXT Uber gimbals, exotic materials and scale of economy are what dictate these things. Plastic can be churned out very quickly once you are tooled up, so machines can poop those parts out by the thousands to satisfy the casuals. Metal parts on the other hand are much more energy intensive to produce no matter what method you are using, particularly precision machined metal parts. I for one am glad there are *finally* options of 'buy it for life' hardware that is actually truly high performance instead of representing a laundry list of compromises that make them frustrating desk ornaments.

They make nice mini joysticks that are close, but not perfect for this. They are too big to mount in any existing hardware without significant surgery. My goal is to make an equivalent performing unit, but in the proper form factor. CMS socket on a Warthog is 20mm, and I'm using that as my initial target dimension. If I can shrink it to 17.5 for their 4-ways after that, all the better. APEM units are made for 25mm socket and have a 29mm flange, and also stick up too high (~20mm above flange, but the low pro is ok at 14mm but an ugly hat) to be mounted the way a normal 4 or 5-way would be. Any one of the compromises would be iffy, but all of them together make it a moot point for me and what I want to use them for and what I think would be well recieved, that being relatively easy drop-in mod for grips that use self-contained 4 and 5-ways (Warthog, Cougar, VirPil, VKB?, my own grip projects etc)

Yeah, VR is not quite there yet but gen 2 or 3 VR is going to be phenomenal... high res, wireless, stereoscopic pass-through cameras for our greenscreeen canopies/instrument/MFD faces, foveated rendering, full hand tracking so you can use kinematic mockup (no wires/boards) cockpits and likely a host of things I'm unaware of or forgetting. I'd say go triple screen in the meantime... the bezels are only distracting until you are in the game world, then they disappear. Much cheaper per pixel than fancy curved monitors, and both will soon be pretty much obsolete for sims in light of the above and you will have 3 normal usable monitors once you do go vr.

Made an album of pics/measurements of my B-5 grip, figured this is a good place to deposit them. full album: https://imgur.com/a/WBoUW

I'm glad to see there is this kind of enthusiasm for this... I've been toying with the idea for a while since the technology if readily available to make this happen but was unsure if the effort would be worth it, but it sounds like there's an actual demand for this.

Does it use a pot with a rotary momentary switch built into it or is this something that is processed on the pcb? Having looked at the drawing again I see it was the lower spring catch I thought was a microswitch is really just part of the grip body.

If you destroyed one of the microJST 1.25mm connectors (presumably the one that connects the tailpiece to the board) you definitely did it wrong. Those little plugs come apart fine, but you have to pull on the right spot and use hemostats if your fingers are too clumsy. If you grab from the wrong direction you are pulling on the socket and not the plug but the socket is soldered down and will break if you do this (my guess to what happened). Your board might be able to be repaired, TM gonna charge you a lot of money for replacement though. TM has plenty of issues, but their use of microJST 1.25 on their pcb is not one of them and honestly a cut above what other manufacturers have done so far which is usually to hard solder everything because it's cheaper/easier.

I can assure you there is a physical button inside the grip, I've seen the drawings with my own eyes plus the designers of the stick/VPC have publicly stated as much when I and others asked. The button is actuated at the end of the brake lever travel, similarly to how Warthog pinky paddle actuated, except this button is internal and a projected 'heel' strikes it and the mechanism is hidden from view. The entire lever travel is picked up by a potentiometer as well, but unless on the VPC base there is nothing to process the signal however the button stays active in either case.

Gunfighter supposed to start shipping March 2016. VKB has had no problem delivering their products so far as I know, their problem has meeting the demand for them. ...that and playing 'musical chairs' with their grip connector' :p I say buy both as soon as they are available, resell the one you like less these things hold their value really well because they are of lifetime construction and the supply does not meet the demand, especially once the other simmers catch on and realize these are what the cool kids use Both gimbals have serious merit, though I place high value on damping so for now Gunfighter IMO is the better option. I do like the idea of convenient tension adjustment on VPC, but once you have your tension set it's not something that I tend to change a lot. Damping (externally adjustable iirc) however comes into play with every. single. input. you make and the effect of using not a trivial novelty.

I wouldn't wait for Christmas if I were you. Your pit is a great example of a VR/braille pit, but you are missing the most obvious and advantageous implantation. An extension not only gives you much greater precision (notably better), it much more closely replicates the kinematics of the actual cockpit you are sitting in so your real movements would better match your virtual ones. Pretty low hanging fruit here for the benefits you would get from it... this is the primary control of your primary controls. Here's one I cobbled together out of Gardena parts, a blown out Cougar gimbal and some scrap aluminum that also has an offset. album: http://imgur.com/a/1HkLN

I know a little bit about them, my mechstick/friction mechanisms + Nyogel 767a are what led to them! :p ..at least inspired VKB to visit the idea of using simple friction components and special damping grease to achieve near hydraulic quality damping. Not gonna get better than well supported FFB if you can get the torque out of it you want, but it's really easy to make a 2 axis friction gimbals to play around with or incorporate into other projects. Check out the one I made for this experiment (using G502 sensor as pickup in a zero-order joystick). It uses only a few pieces of angle aluminum, cut with a wood saw and drilled on a cheap drill press. http://imgur.com/a/jTw6H

Mongoos or Gunfighter? Yes.

This is truly fantastic Trip, I know it's been a long road getting here but looks like your efforts were well spent. This is real no-nonsense design and function, and I like your use of the box enclosures to serve as guards to keep humies out of the business parts. I would however recommend installing at least a lap belt but more preferably a 4pt harness. Machines can 'hiccup', and if you are on it when that happens, well. Pretty easy to install and cheap too, I can share some pics of Tanaka 4pt harness I just did for one of the machines the co I work for makes. I can post here, but don't like doing that in people's build threads unless they want so either pm me or let me know. Really hard to describe the immersion level once you add realistic and timely suggestions of acceleration when your 'in the zone'. Really great to see someone take the challenges of a project like this seriously. Most motion platforms aimed at VR now are gimicks, designed around the wrong principals/goals things like being able to invert or spin 360deg which impress people that don't understand vestibular disconnect, but make seasoned motion folk groan. The goal of a motion platform in VR is what I have dubbed 'vestibular re-connect', the literal opposite of disconnect aka motion sickness. The problem is a mismatch between what you see (and hence expect to feel) and what you actually feel. Mismatch is determined by your brain to be the effects of having eaten poison and pumps your stomach for you. Wonderful 500k years ago when our ancestors ate the wrong berries, but terribly inconvenient in the modern age. A good platform can remove that mismatch. How much of your setup is Thanos off/shelf stuff vs DIY? What motion cuing system are you using? Any idea of your load capacity, latency, work envelope size? What games/sims are you able to interface with? Are you using parameter extraction programs or native motion support?

Here's my Gardena/scrap aluminum 15cm extension w/50mm aft offset and 7deg fwd pitch... very close to mass-balanced now, and the reaches more ergonomic than with no offset or fwd pitch. album: http://imgur.com/a/1HkLN

Heh, same here. There's nothing like it. I've been making friction mechanisms like this http://imgur.com/a/ixi64 since 2012 and took me a while to find proper damping grease to make it work, and it's called Nyogel 767a. I'm now waiting on a sample of Nyogel PG44A, which is the one-up heavier version of 767a. Here's a few demo vids I use to explain what this stuff is. ${1} ${1} I've spent a lot of time on various forums on my soapbox, though a lot of Warthog users cling to their Molykote EM30L for some reason. Nyogel lubricates every bit as good as Molykote, but Molykote is definitely not a damping grease and this is a critical element for input devices with moving parts.

Lithium is not good for this. Sure it won't melt the plastic, but it's quick to foul and get rachet-y again. It's a poor lubricant in its prime, and an even worse damping grease. This is another use case for Nyogel 767a. It's a formulated for damping, and will add smooth controlled drag to the movement and it doesn't get ratchety or suffer sticktion long after other greases would have fouled. Been using this stuff for a long time now for friction mechanisms (including throttles) and it's straight up magic. I spent years experimenting with different greases looking for this stuff, and it was really hard to get at first (world supply was depleted), though now readily available: http://www.oveready.com/nyogel-lubricants/nyogel-767aa-dampening-grease-10g-tube-/prod_421.html ${1} This grease is also the basis of how VKB's damping mechanisms work. Damping is critical for input devices with moving parts operated by humans... it significantly smooths our shakey tendencies, filtering out 'biological judder', allowing us to operate with higher finesse.