Thadiun Okona

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 ;)

I just wish they'd announce whether or not they are making a throttle to go with it. If not, I'll make a conversion kit for Warthog throttles but if they are making one it would be a massive waste of time. Would be nice to know in advance though to time the release.

Honestly if you have the money, time, space, and skill go 6dof. It's not about extreme excursions, it's about extreme accuracy in recreating accelerations to the best of a machine's ability. To that end, 2dof machines do a poor job as they tend to swing the pilot's head to and fro in an arc, which your inner ear picks up and processes but it is a false cue. Most of the time the machine is trying to use gravity to trick an accel force but problems arise as they need to travel to that position to do so, and that's what separates the toys from the tools. A 6dof machine tends to have less overall range of motion, however a lot of it's movement is dedicated to cancelling out those false cues. This is done by interpolating the rotation point to the pilot's head for starters, so your head only rotates while the machine is making a pendulous arc beneath you. Another trick the 'extra' axes do is provide an initial jolt directly in the axis of accel, while the machine is setting up the gravity angle for the sustained pull and that is choreographed to be seamless. There are a host of tricks that all combine, and in the end there are good reasons entities with the money/time/space choose this type of platform. Net result: your inner ear and eye maintain the best match possible, something particularly important in VR. Accurate/timely suggestions of acceleration at lower amplitude are worth far more for what you are trying to achieve than high amplitude events that lack accuracy or have false cues can provide. 2dof systems are neat and all, but 3dof is where things get interesting and can still be pretty convincing... heave (vertical up/down) is a lot more important than most realize. Professional training sims for flight with only 2dof are typically pitch/heave, not pitch/roll because roll buys practically nothing. You feel heave activity throughout a normal flight but only feel the sensation of rolling if you turn uncoordinated. The goal of the axes are pretty much the opposite of your thought process... the additional axes are not there to be 'felt', they are there to make false cues *not be felt. I myself do not have the space or money to do a 6dof system justice, but might make a 3dof system in the form factor D-Box uses for practicality. You should hit up Trip Rodreguez, I talked him off the 2dof ledge and he built a Thanos style 6dof that he's very happy with and he posts in this forum. source: mostly anecdotal observation as a long time diy simdork plus 2 years working in the industry

Stereoscopic pass-through cameras could open the door to using physical cockpits with greenscreen outside views/canopies/instrument/mfd/display faces/etc, which is essentially one of the holy grails of simulation. The increase in resolution may not seem huge, but current gen cards still need to be able to run it and bumping up the pixels per degree by 33% certainly will make text and bogies and SAM's easier to see and noticeably sharpen the image. Beyond cockpits/sims and experiences where you are not held back by the limitation of the inferior tracking range of the controllers, MS VR is a wanting experience so even if all else were equal this will be a hmd that noticeably outdoes them since the increase in res is the only feature they offer that is an upgrade (and only in the case of the Odyssey which uses AMOLED screens and custom optics), all else being a sidestep or downgrade. The stereoscopic pass-through potentially puts this on another tier altogether though.

It takes ~3-5g of Nyogel to grease up a Warthog, and should't make any noise when done. 10g tubes can be procured from Oveready https://www.oveready.com/flashlight/nyogel-767aa-damping-grease-10g-tube/ I bought a 50g tube a few years ago and have greased a lot of things with it and sent several folks small amounts to grease their Warthogs with and still have a bunch left in my tube.

I thought the use of 3.3v was just manufacturers being cheapskates by making Vcc the same for sensors as the brain/chip. It seems like ff anything, lowering Vcc will make a cheap pot seem even cheaper :p I recently learned (I think from you?) that Alegro sensors are fine at 3.3v even though they are rated between 4.5 and 5.5vdc though.

No resistors needed, Alegro sensors will hook up just like the old pots do. The only thing about using them (and any other Hall sensor) is that you can not invert them by swapping Vcc with Ground, that will only short the sensor. If you need reverse action (Cougar throttle needs this) you have to mechanically do it, easily achieved using an RC pushrod to transfer motion. For the Cougar though this is a moot point and the direction the pots hook up is the same as Halls will.

Sounds like a faulty ground imo. It's normal for the 'tree' to light up when you disconnect the grip. Your miniDIN connection is suspect somewhere in the chain. Alternatively, if you've ever opened up the grip, most likely you pinched a wire somewhere, it's really easy to do with Cougar grips.

I've been using Alegro 1324 with Cougar with great results. Super easy to work with, has 90deg range of electrical resolution and pretty sensitive so you don't need huge magnets. I've used them to make my own sealed pots but they work fine as 'naked' sensors too. Here's my post about the pots though: http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3674791/diy-sealed-minature-hall-pots-on-the-cheap#Post3674791 I initially used A1302 (180deg electrical range) but have since switched to 1324 due to the 90deg range but make identical pots using the same magnets (5mm x 1mm N52 Neodymium x2)

Can you pm me the file? I had it at one point but can't find it and I don't have an IL2 account and need it for my own projects. I finally got a proper resin printer and am going to explore how much oversize I need to print it so it will be the right size after cast pewter cools (3-5% or so). I do investment casting and that would be a waste of energy/materials/resources to cast them this way. Pewter can be cast in rubber molds and will be much stronger than the original plastic, no need for exotic metals here but ABS is clearly insufficient. Steel will likely interfere with the MX sensor, it's pretty sensitive and much more subject to magnetic noise than other Halls I've worked with. I'd stick to non ferrous options.

If TM doesn't make a Hornet throttle I'll make a conversion kit for the Warthog throttle. I have been casting grips in resin (left hand Warthog grips currently) but finally got my printer (high res SLA printer) to do my own pattern making so will be able to expand to things like this. I'm waiting to see what TM does first because it's too much work if someone else will already be doing it so I've been keeping an eye on this situation.

Rift would work uniquely well with hearing aids because you can make it so the speakers are not even touching your ears or just partly touching them, due to the adjustability of the arms that hold them to the headband.