Thadiun Okona

Here's a useful resource for this thread if it's not already known... a CAD generator for making custom pulleys to print. I downloaded OpenSCAD and generated pulleys with it and it works quite well. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:16627 I've been pursuing my MSFFII mod and finally have all the parts together, (the Shotkey diodes I needed were out of stock -everywhere- until last month) other than the large pulleys I've yet to print. Not sure if I should post about it here at this point though since it's in a very different direction than this thread has chosen so will start my own thread once I'm cutting metal and soldering have things to take pics of. I've already posted most of the relevant info along the way anyhow. I acquired some 30t GT2 and 20t GT3 pulleys to do a comparison to evaluate the tactile properties though, which I'll post here after I get the belts and make a test rig for them. My drive will be 25:1 (5:1 x2), based on one of these pulleys. I wound up using the 03 models of the 14000 series Pittman motors I linked before (skewed armature brushed DC motors that can be driven from a modded version of the MS circuit). Motor selection came down to cost, as these were readily available on ebay for pretty cheap along with some resistors to bring the voltage drop to the desired range. Torque will be ~3.5 - 4Nm after reduction.

https://mwomercs.com/forums/topic/111003-mechpit-ii-a-practical-approach/

Well, right aileron and up elevator to turn right... right pedal would be used to keep that action coordinated but you don't turn a plane with the rudder like a boat :p

This is what I've been waiting to see. For some applications I prefer a hard center like opposing rocker arms (tweezers) apply, but for others not so much. The mechanism however looks like it would be fairly straight forward to swap out with a cam mod however, though modding $500 pedals is probably not an idea situation for most. Also would be easy to incorporate a nice damping mechanism as well. Either way it's great to see a big manufacturer make a serious set of pedals though.

I make these dust shields to keep gunk from getting into the bases while in use. They are die cut out of .012" thick mylar http://www.dualsticks.com/dustshields/

Tracking shouldn't be anything less than CV1.. make sure there are objects in the space your in for the headset's cameras to be able to use as tracking references. The only times I hear of issues are spaces that are too featureless or dark.

Before everyone gets too excited, Nate Mitchel ( Oculus Co-founder & Head of Rift) popped by a thread on reddit to help manage expectations.

A single sensor is indeed fine for cockpits. Yes the dual sensors are to provide tracking for the hand controllers in 6dof, to reduce occlusion, but with a single sensor, the HMD is still tracked in all 6dof whether your sitting down or not. Tiny lateral movements cause major shifts in near/far field objects through the mechanism of parallax and even in the confines of being strapped in a cockpit our heads can move 20-40cm in those axes so they are critical to track in VR or else the experience is instantly nauseating.

The performance hit for the higher res screen is not so bad since it's the equivalent of running higher PD/SS settings only in this case it's for real pixels instead of sub pixels. Put another way, running Vive Pro at native resolution at SS of 1.0 is the equivalent of running CV1 at SS of 1.7 or so. Get the Ti if you can afford the extra horsepower, they also announced 11 series cards so if you're not building right now perhaps an 1180/Ti which are set to launch summer or fall... https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-11-series-launching-around-july-gddr6-mass-production-timeline-confirms/

They should keep in mind that rubber molds have a shelf life, as well as a 'library' life. Shelf life is how long the rubber lasts sitting on the shelf (ozone and UV are the enemy). Library life is how many pours you get before the molds stsrt getting ragged due to chemical interaction. I can already see discoloring from having several pours done, which means they won't be good much longer and a new set will need to be made and if it's not done before parts start looking jacked all is lost. I use platinum silicone with urethane resin and am lucky if I get more than 20 pours before molds are a lost cause. Personally in this situation (I cast resin flight grips) once I dial in a mold I 'download a hard copy'... meaning I make a perfect negative of the mold using tough pattern making material with super low shrink like Smooth-Cast 385. That way once the silicone ages or a critical nub breaks off, I can easily pour a new mold halves without having to fully set up the mold (risers, sprues, vents, locks, plugs, parting lines, etc), which takes a whole lot longer and can be quite frustrating. IMO those backup negatives are the real molds, the rubber tooling for making end use parts are fragile, temporary, and disposable and need to be treated as such or else the project will be short lived.

Adding to this... the MagREZ sensors can be used as direct replacements for the pots on the Cougar mainboard... the one in pic is debolestis's and uses his own board because he didn't have the stock one.

You should pick up one of debolestis's awesome printed replacement gimbals. They replicate the kinematics and precision of the Uber gimbals at 10% the cost. https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=195464

I'm interested in such a part as well. I have a torn down T16k with that shaft in tact and can supply precision measurements of any of the geometry if needed.

I'm building a full scale column with mine ...but for a sailplane cockpit (I'm sisu1a on the Condor forum) which in this case is 30cm in pitch/25 in roll, a good bit shorter than what you probably want plus my grip will be really light. The modified MSFF circuit will be running 2.8A vs the stock output of 0.7A; so @24v this is ~70w. While it might be possible to go crazy with the gear ratio, 24:1 is already two reductions (4:1+6:1). Going much beyond that may run into inertia problems but conveniently the way MSFFII circuit is designed it is based on stick position vs motor position, so it would be pretty straight forward test to since motor position is inconsequential. The most powerful motors in the Pittman 14000 range that could be run at full torque with this exact need to be ~70w. The 14206 is 75w (36.5 oz/in, and the 48v version has the proper resistance) so I'll use that as a reference for the thinking. At 24:1, this yields ~5.75Nm. If you wanted to experiment with higher ratios though, a systematic way would be to plan for 24:1 but run that through a third reduction to see what you can get away with to see if you can get it up to the torque you want. If it works without unintended side effects... score ...but share the magic numbers! For reference, by my estimates (lacking motor specs, I'm comparing to the closest motor from Pittman which is probably optimistic), the stock MSFF is <0.4Nm There are also mods where people brute force two MSFFII's together, which would get you over 11Nm all things being equal. Man, I thought I wanted high forces... the glider I fly (SZD-59 Acro) ailerons really load up at higher speeds -set in concrete above 90kts, though most sailplanes have much lighter stick forces. I can see how warbird controls would req the crazy torque you want though.. mechanical linkages, big birds, high speeds, long levers etc. I was initially going for really high forces (and a full blown roll-your-own solution), but have scaled back my ambitions because perfect became the enemy of good :p A luck would have it, I'm already waiting to hear back from Roland van Roy (the electrical engineer who cooked up that particular MSFFII mod) to see about running higher current with the same parts and asked if it's possible to run more current through it or possibly to beef it up further. It might just be a matter of bumping up the amp ratings of the MOSFETs and Shottkeys which are the most likely candidates to let the magic smoke out.

Brummer has off-shelf FF bases for this already. Not sure about the Iris stuff, though they turned up at flight sim trade shows recently showing more of their hardware and in different form factors so it seems like they're moving forward with them one way or another. Here's a link to Brummer's unit... 5Nm force, accepts TM/VPC/etc grips and it's relatively compact as well https://www.brunner-innovation.swiss/product/cls-e-joystick/ If the price comparison and feature list and performance of Brummer's yoke vs Iris's is similar, Brummer has a lot more to offer and for less money in addition to being established already in the field of flight simulation and control loading.

Very nice hardware from Brummer... if I were in the market for plug-n-play or at least some leapfrog components to jumpstart making the stick I really want it would be a great option. 5Nm force in such a compact device is impressive! 3ph ac motors are way out of my league but definitely the way to go if you're going all-in and more importantly have interfacing to support it. Since I'm building a stick to replicate aircraft I've flown/have interest in flying, this rules out gimbals with x/y on the same (geometric) plane. Many if not most aircraft are coupled shorter in roll than in pitch by a few inches, which also complicates gimbals design because it either req the mechanism to take a lot of space (to route pushrods/cables) or one of the motors has to 'go for a ride' like the design settled on in this thread, which is the same design conclusion I came to in 2008 when I was first working on this (the sailplane sim it was being made for was already dated by then so I mothballed my project but its successor just released, Condor2). This leaves me fabricating all the hardware, and since I'm on a very tight budget and also really don't want to reinvent the wheel, as I have mentioned before I am all about hacking MSFFII for practicality reasons. It has a decent ready-to-use interface and also there are known upgrade paths to achieve high quality FF, plus Condor2 devs have that stick and have tuned performances to it nicely so reinventing that wheel (which I have already done before) is well into the zone of diminishing returns. The motors I settled on are not 'cheap' in the general sense even though they really are in relative terms (compared to other brands), but being popular means they can be found as surplus for a lot less money if you know what you're looking for. For the MSFF hack though, unfortunately the more commonly found 24v versions of those motors will not work, the terminal resistance is far too low so it will force the PWM into a 100% duty cycle at full current, so for the 14000 series motors they req different voltages at different sizes (there are 7 sizes in that series, my focus is mostly on 14204; good size/power) to achieve the proper resistance for the MSFFII circuit. The 48v version of 14204 has terminal resistance is just about 4ohm, which is very close to ideal when calculating the voltage drop at full current (2.8a x 4ohm = 11.2v, where 12v is ideal). It's a 26oz/in motor (stalled torque), which at 24:1 ratio yields a mechanism with ~4.4Nm, very close in strength to the Brummer units which are 5Nm and will come out around the same size (or also work in the CAD design in this thread). To this end I'm in talks with a motor manufacturer in China that claims to have perfect clones of those motors, down to the skewed armatures and identical performance but an order of magnitude less expensive than the Pittmans. Not sure how long it will take to get my hands on some to evaluate, but if they work for this it will provide a very reasonable pathway to functionality and it might make sense to do some group buys in the future for anyone that wants to follow. Doing my homework on belts has led me to GT3 (successor to GT2), which is the current iteration of Gates's modified version of HTD rounded tooth pattern I was excited about in my last post. At 9mm width I don't think the 2mm pitch version are strong enough for this torque, but the 3mm pitch version is 4x stronger so likely the proper one but I'm going to get samples of both to evaluate the tactile implications as well as stretch/wear testing. If they feel like a zipper I'm going back to shaft-winding technique, either with wire rope or Spectra/Dyneema which is a lot less stretchy than steel and no more bleeding fingers! @aburro, I wouldn't kill my Warthog yet if I were you but the answer to your question is no, you would need 2 arduino/steering wheel units, once for each axis but I have no idea how flight sims would react with that if at all. This gives me an idea to test my G29 as the 'rudder' in Condor2 though, which has FF commands presumably DirectInput API like the x/y, and I suppose might as well test in on the x/y too... if anything interesting comes of it I'll edit this post.

https://imgur.com/a/1HkLN

The pedals I made for my sailplane sim were pretty easy to make and didn't cost a whole lot but would also make perfect anti-torque pedals as well. I bought a set of old Aeronca Champ rudder pedals off ebay and cobbled them together with some scrap metal and some old pushrods plus a hacked Logitech Attack III joystick lol..

1. yes, microJST 1.25 2. yes, but only if you have the right tools, like a precise controlled soldering iron with a fine point tip, de-soldering braid, flux. The pins are very close together so it won't be easy to re-solder the new one but is possible. TM are not very diy/fix-it-yourself friendly and even when they did their shipping cost generally make small parts not worth it, at least once they moved their headquarters overseas.

Which is better? Both. For displacement based controls, center. Your entire body helps stabilize inputs and help provide feedback like some kind of sensory-augmenting armrest. The throw is larger and the lever longer, all of which add up to higher precision for large displacements, particularly useful for flying craft that req holding inputs for any length of time. For force based systems side mount works better. With force sensing your arm stays put on its armrest so you are never making 'free floating' inputs. Compare writing with a pen/paper as normal, now lift your entire arm from contacting the page/desk and do it again. Not impossible, but not as accurate and more fatiguing. With displacement based controls on the side, your whole arm needs to frequently be moved from the position of rest and the short coupled stick combined with a lowered ability to make precise inputs makes it less than ideal, much like lifting your entire arm to write. Which is better, displacement based controls or force sensing? Again, both. Displacement controls work better in light aircraft and helicopters, where you are likely to be making frequent and vigorous inputs, and also making inputs that are sustained lengths of time for the normal course of flight. Force sensing makes more sense when flying craft that are stable and you're just nudging about but also with chances of experiencing sustained G's and occasional abrupt changes in attitude, like an F-16 for example. Human's are better at regulating inputs when it takes much higher forces at lower displacements when getting rattled about. This really comes into play flying modern high performance jets, though some like the F-15 use a combination of the two to have the best of both worlds throughout a wide envelope. There's not one-size-fits all solution because the end goals of different hardware and control approaches are min/maxed to their specific use cases, yielding a wide array of form factors and ergonomic and performance considerations, and with simming also practicality is a consideration because you need to fly your computer on top of the plane.

Interesting, worth a try... if I can recover the photos from even one useful cockpit post it will have been worth it! Use imgur from now on though...

Maybe if you use a 3rd party program like Joystick Gremlin you can bind them into a single 'virtual controller' that will remember your device id's it's assigned to the inputs. https://whitemagic.github.io/JoystickGremlin/

Friction joints are pretty easy, and if you use real damping grease in them work almost as well as straight up hydraulic damping. Here's a few albums showing simple compression type joints, where two moving faces are compressed against each other with a greased plastic rub in between them. By using a thrust bearing on one side of the joint, you can precisely regulate the friction by adjusting the nut. This is a positioning joystick, it moves the way a throttle does, but in two axes, pitch/yaw in this case. https://imgur.com/a/ixi64 Very smooth tension and will hold its position when I let go. Because I use real damping grease it takes no more force to break if from a standstill than it does anywhere else in the moving stroke. Every other grease I tried would make it ratchet long before I achieved desired tension. Here's another version of it, this one is pitch/roll (would make a great helicopter gimbals) https://imgur.com/a/jTw6H that was also an experiment to see if a hemispherical section of metal could be used as a 'mousepad' to pick up a Logitech G502 mouse sensor mounted on it. It worked, but the results in practice were indistinguishable from using TARGET and absolute mouse emulation other than having no control over x and y independently from each other. Both albums have dissections of the friction joints with descriptions and parts lists. The grease I use for this is called Nyogel 767a and is in a class of its own when it comes to this. I also have a throttle made this way, but not documented well but the anatomy is the same...

Interesting thread, but there are some reasons why the motors they use are unlikely to be up to this task. A FF steering wheel is a different animal that has 900-1080deg of travel, which makes motor selection much more forgiving. Using a 24:1 gear ratio, comparing total motor revolutions vs device travel the increased range of motion means it's roughly 19 to 23 times(!) less affected by magnetic cogging than a joystick application where your total travel is 30deg. 24:1 ratio @ +/-15deg = +/- 1 motor revolution 24:1 ratio @ +/-540deg = +/-22.5 motor revolutions 24:1 ratio @ +/-450deg = +/-18.75 motor revolutions They ultimately settled on 12:1 ratio for that setup which would double negative cogging effects cited above but a 12" wheel is like a 6" stick in terms of moment arm. Conveniently for this conversation doubling the power to match a 12" stick would happen at 24:1 so the numbers stand in direct comparison. The thread was appreciated though and led me to Cousin Of Open Sim Wheel so now I'm eyeballing nice (used) big brushed dc motors with skewed armatures for a DD wheel. https://www.xsimulator.net/community/threads/cousin-of-osw-open-sim-wheel.10915/ Even with expensive motors gear ratios can not be continually increased without running into penalties but I concede the exact numbers are not 100% certain. Those tradeoffs are likely why MS capped it at 24:1 instead of say 48:1 with motors half the power, but cost/complexity may have influenced this too. With how good it works in practice, my guess is 24:1 is where the lines converged on the chart after experienced engineers applied calculus to optimize torque multiplication vs the penalties of the motor/system inertia. For this reason, I maintain this is a sensible place to start from. There are two advantages of higher ratios though, reduced motor cogging effects and increased torque. Designing around 24:1 runs the least risk of running into complications though. Either way, FF sticks are sensitive to motor performance because the low rotation/limited range of motion poses challenges to the goal of smooth output with high torque, making suitable motors harder to find (generally more expensive) than less demanding use cases.

Motors are the heart of these things that without suitable ones FF is a nonstarter so by all means please show us all and link what you think are reasonable cost motors that are suitable for FF.