Thadiun Okona

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.

For motors suitable for FF they are quite reasonably priced, and because they are brushed they don't require an expensive drive to go along with them and can be told what to do by a modded MSFFII. By suitable I mean they have skewed armatures to reduce magnetic cogging (reluctance torque). This property is not a given for motors (uncommon in fact) but a key ingredient for force feedback because power needs to be smoooooth even though the motors are barely moving. Once you get into applications that req high torque/low RPM you are no longer shopping for just any old motor that happens to fit or look good on paper. Also, Pittman makes a lot of these so they can actually be found as surplus or used, making them more attractive than any other options I've considered for this in a long time. Whether brushed or brushless, if the motors you want to use were not -specifically designed for low rpm/high torque- it's a recipe for disappointment for FF. Here's a chart for brushed motors showing cogging vs rpm, comparing a straight armature vs a skewed one: https://www.infolytica.com/en/applications/ex0075/ If you know where to get cheaper motors suitable for FF, brushed or brushless I'd be interested in adding them to my bookmarks. My post was not about the motors but aimed at validating belt drive as power transmission, and bringing up the 24:1 gear ratio since I think 50:1 is the last I remember being seen thrown about. I talked down belt drive in several previous posts but have since changed my mind after looking closer at the belts themselves and how Fanatec uses them once I realized how nice their wheels are and it seemed relevant to this thread.

I hate self-quoting, but it's relevant to my current thoughts and plans and it made more sense than editing a buried post... Now that Condor2 (sailplane/soaring sim) is soon releasing(!), I'm really keen to get a force feedback stick working in short order. The Condor devs have MSFFII sticks and really use them to great effect (rl glider pilots that have tuned the game to that stick... I fly glides too and can they did indeed do a good job of it and have provisions for pedals too along with UDP output streams for motion platforms etc) here so it reinforces my inclination to use it as the interface vs rolling my own. For now I'm just soldering some resistors in a MSFFII to double the current with the existing hardware to run a longer stick, much like in this example. Later I'm going to double it again (400% original current, like this example), which req upgrading some diodes/caps/mosfets and using my own power supply, in this case a 24v 7a power brick. I found reasonable priced/sized motors suitable for this, brushed 24vdc servomotors with skewed armatures designed to minimize magnetic cogging. Pittman Lo-Cog 14000 series have good form factors for this too. My long winded preamble that makes it relevant to this thread that has different options for all of the above, is that I have revisited the idea of belt drive again for power transmission. After seeing how Fanatec uses belts in their excellent wheels it got me thinking. Then after looking at the cross-section of HTD belts with their semi-circular teeth it seems apparent why the 'zipper effect' is so minimal on their gear. They don't use HTD but something very similar but one of the things Fanatec does that makes theirs behave so smoothly is use idler wheels to increase the contact area the belt is on the pulleys. Here's the pic that shows ~270deg of the pulley in contact. Getting the wrap ratio really high like that will go a long way to minimizing the effect each individual tooth makes when coming in contact with the pulley, thus minimizing the tactile effect. This combined with the rounded tooth pattern of HTD belts should be subtle enough to be a non-issue for this application, so I plan on getting some HTD 3m x9mm belts/pulleys to build with. If it turns out to be an issue, I can always switch back to shaft-winding using the same hardware and COTS solutions get the ball rolling. Another issue I've been considering which I brought up earlier was mechanical advantage ratios. Again looking to the MSFFII as a benchmark to draw from, I'm going to stick with their 24:1 ratio (+/-15 deg stick travel = +/- 1 full motor revolution). My thinking is this. Microsoft had real engineers really think their design through, including min/maxing torque advantage vs undesirable inertial effects. Although the motors I'm going to be using are bigger/heavier, torque equations scale linearly so the true min/max ratio would still be in the same ballpark, given similar motor construction so seems an ideal baseline. Unless I'm putting 2 and 2 together and coming up with 22 :p TL;DR: I changed my mind about belt drive in light of Fanatec hardware, and think 24:1 gear ratio MS used in the FFII is likely the ideal ratio as a starting point

I'll take them if you're just tossing them anyhow...

That is definitely the right size, but if the guy is a machinist just have him use a single-point cutter and tell him to 'pick up the thread' and save yourself a bunch of money to have better results. He's a machinist so he should know to use a left hand cutting tool and run the machine in reverse (this starts the cut at the blind end and the tool runs towards the opening so no way to crash) which sounds more complicated than it is... it's pretty standard fare for cutting female threads in a blind hole. I'm a machinist as well, and have made several M-36x2 components for projects out of metal, both male and female. You don't even use taps or dies for holes this big, you cut them single-point on a lathe though in your case you just want to chase threads already there. You would still need a lathe just to use a tap anyhow, you can't just chuck the nut in a vise without crushing it or distorting it, it has to go in a 3 or 4 jaw chuck to properly support the piece for the high torque it will receive from attempting to run a tap into it, and if it's tight enough fit it might not survive the brute force. Also, you need a BOTTOMING TAP for this and those will always be listed as such. Without this in the title it is a plug or regular taper tap and bottoming taps cost way more than regular taps and way way more than a new nut from Shapeways printed out of metal cost. I've seen resharpened and used ones for as cheap as $90 on ebay but this is not a household item. This is a very shallow/large diameter blind hole so is nothing like working on a deep hole or a through hole. As such it req either special tools (bottoming tap, or modifying a plug or taper tap to be a makeshift bottoming tap) or tricky logistics (picking up a female thread much harder than picking up a male). Honesty if you're willing to buy an M-36x2 bottoming tap you should just have your machinist friend precision measure (to the hundredth mm) some key dimensions (outer diameter, minor/inner diameter, height) so debolestis can figure out how to alter the file so that when Shapeways *finishes* the printing process the part is the size of the desired specs. Once you know how much smaller the real world part ends up after the laws of thermodynamics have their way with it, you can massage the part file to compensate and this will be cheaper and better than buying an expensive tap you only need to use once that might not even work.

That's the wrong size.. should be M36x2, that is m32. A tap will not be able to clean these theads up unless you bot a special one called a 'bottoming tap'. Due to the shallow depth vs the large diameter, a normal tap is far too tapered to clean the threads up before bottoming out. I sometimes cut tapered taps with a diamond tool/water to diy my own bottoming taps because they cost a lot more in most cases, especially m36x2! I suspect the issue with printed metal is that there is shrinkage going from fusing temps to room temp. It can likely be compensated for by making models for metal printing say 5% larger, but without knowing the exact shrinkage ratio it would be hard to get right. There is also some variance even using the same materials, depending on several other variables but once you knew the expected range it could be compensated for. If you model a reference object and have it printed in metal, measuring it's actual dimensions vs modeled dimensions might give you a close approximation to go from. If someone can precisely measure the metal one that's a problem, you might be able to figure out how much to compensate by from that. It needs to be precisely measured for this but comparing actual results to the modeled part should provide the answers.

Aww man, I should have stayed in better touch with Manuel because I'm in the middle of doing the exact same thing, many thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours into making it happen :/

There were many that fit that description, the king of which was called the NXT Uber Gimbals and cost like $600, cnc machined out of aluminum and used expensive Midori Hall sensors. Debolestis made a printable knock off that achieves the same exact kinematics and uses cheaper non contact sensors that are arguably better. https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=195464

Yes but only if the price is right and you replace the gimbals with the Uber knockoff debolestis makes you can buy from Shapeways for ~$60 (plus some hardware and sensors)

NO! You can't make me do it! I'd rather spend 10x longer just to have half the functionality and still need to rebind my controls for every plane every time there is a patch wipe or I reinstall! >:o ;)

If only someone made software for this joystick that allowed users to get them to easily function exactly how they want and never lose their settings again ;)

Kind of a waste of two TARGET capable (and flash programmable through CCP) 12 bit axes though, but I suppose if they're not even getting used in the first place...

This is a standard feature of TARGET

If only someone made software to use with this joystick that made basic functions like this an extreme non issue ;)