james111333

Thanks, yeah, I kept checking on it and panicking haha, the more I looked, the more I convinced myself that I would regret it if I didn't buy it, I was like a kid at Christmas when it arrived, it makes the Warthog feel like a toy. Then my wife found out how much I paid for it.....

Thanks, although I only did the design / blueprints etc, it is my friend who did the lathe work. The collective has a trigger switch that I have wired up to an electro magnet which engages with a disc, a lot like a disc brake on a car however with the steering damper set where I want it, there's just a bit too much leverage and the collective droops when the brake is engaged. It should be an easy fix though as it is polished chrome (magnet) against smooth steel (brake disc) and even with 10kg magnetism there is no resistance to the torque. I am thinking a paper thin layer of rubber bonded to the inside of the disc and it will increase the grip massively. Overall though, even in it's unfinished state, it has truly and profoundly changed my immersion and enjoyment in helicopters (in VR too) I recommend to anyone considering swapping out a throttle for a collective to do it, I feel so much more connected with the helicopter and the resolution of the Hall effect potentiometer is amazing. I have recently moved so am currently building a version 2.0 home cinema / gaming room but I am desperate to get back in on it! When I've moved in to the new room the next stage will be making a box to house all of the electrics etc which will act as a base for the mechanism. My sofa is modular so I am able to lift out a cushion and slot in the collective which puts it at the right height relative to my seating position. The sofa itself will be a bit of a 'hub' with USB and power connectors built in as well as all the tactile transducer bits and bobs so that is a bit of a project on it's own. The aim is to quickly change from normal HOTAS for fixed wing and a short throw stick to the helicopter setup which will be the collective and extended cyclic more like what helos use. The wires also drove me nuts when flying sat on a sofa so there will be lots of cable management and strategically placed USB ports!

:joystick:

At the moment with settings pretty much max (no shadows though) I never run out of ram as I close browsers etc. That's with 16GB 2400mhz. With a better CPU and maybe shadows on, unless anything else changes, would I start needing more RAM? I only free fly with a mate with minimal other traffic on my servers so would that add demand on my RAM? There's normally no more than 2 or 3 additional aircraft on top of our F-14s

Surely 0.5PD in DCS and 400% SS in steam will look terrible because actual pixels are not being drawn by the graphics engine? So the 400% SS is in fact being applied but to an already horrible image. Like the saying "You can't polish a turd" 400% of nothing is still nothing. Thanks for the table and effort though, unless steam displays the data differently to FPSVR (highly recommend it if you have not got it) I can only dream of those frametimes. I'm at 15ms CPU and 20-30ms GPU when running a server with weather at 30fps on my Reverb.

When you reduce image quality it runs smoother? This could be the breakthrough we've been looking for!!!

Thanks, your system is a beast, although what kind of utilisation do you get in the Titan in DCS? (You should also get a Reverb haha, it must be like owning a Ferrari and installing a muddy landrover windscreen in it with the Vive:lol:) You've opened up a can of worms now as I was unaware of B die ram, I'd seen it mentioned in other scenarios but hadn't taken much notice. What kit do you have specifically? So would 16GB 3600+ C14 B-die be better for DCS than 32GB 3200 C16? It will be on a 10900k watercooled with custom loop and 5x120 rad area and aircooled 2080ti until the 3080ti comes out. Thanks for everyone's input!

Thanks for the info, especially your test findings, I understand we know very little about z490, it appears to accommodate faster memory but if there are no real life gains in DCS, I would be better off spending it on fancy beer haha. It clearly doesn't scale well as adding 500mhz at the lower end (and looser timings) gave me 15fps which was all I needed to stay nicely in ASW with my Rift. It's heartbreaking to see my 2080ti at 60% load on my HP reverb with 30ms latency so I'm hoping that will change with the 10 series.

I'm building a new system soon for DCS VR, I'm thinking of an mATX MB for my 10900k and 2080ti but one thing I am craving other than the CPU upgrade from my 4790k at 4.8GHz is faster ram, both the jump from DDR3 to DDR4 and also from 2200mhz to 4400mhz, I found that for my use, DCS loved the increase from 2000mhz! All of the posts I am reading seem to be outdated due to the insane cost of RAM in recent years but now it's super cheap, I assume the consensus has changed. What will see the best returns, either 16GB 4400mhz ram or 32GB 3200mhz for DVS in VR, they are about the same price and this build is basically just for DCS and Firefox! I would rather just use 2 RAM slots so if I go for the 16GB I probably wouldn't want to add another 16GB further down the line. Thanks for any input, I know the question has been asked lots before but now RAM is so cheap I would expect opinions to have changed in our shared goal of eeeking out those jarring frame drops and (Orange) frame times. :joystick:

Hi, with WMR this is quite common (I've had 3) as mentioned above, poor lighting kills your DOF but also there is a bug in the room boundary that happens if you loose tracking sometimes (like looking down at a lighting panel in F14 etc) The workaround for me is to lift up the headset, open the WMR home screen that should be lurking on the taskbar, then open the Room Boundary Visuals side tab, turn it on then off again, head back to dcs by bringing the preview screen to the front again and all should be sorted :)

I'd love for this to be a thing. Is there any news on it? It may not be fully indicative of gains but I saw huge fps improvements with my rift s when I cut steam out of the equation. Now I am stuck with it as I have an HP Reverb. Native support would be awesome!

Ebay :music_whistling:

After the pin was completed, it was time to move on to the base and sides of the housing. it was all laser cut from 10mm plate stainless steel. There's also a sneak preview of the brake disc in that shot too. The plates were then marked up for all of the various holes and machining to house the bearings and cables within the steel plate itself. Side plate after a bit of initial buffing..... Until we get to this :thumbup:

The next part we called the 'pin' essentially it's the axle for the collective lever, my goal here was to integrate the pot into the center of it to keep it as clean looking as possible on the outside. As illustrated in the video of the 3D plan, the pin consists of 2 hollowed out parts which are held together with grub screws, the pot is also secured with a grub screw once in place. Here's the initial machining, i it's made from solid stainless rod. Here's the finished pin, believe it or not, it's 2 separate parts that fit perfectly together! He's a lathe god haha. The joint is just to the left of the grub screw on the wider section of the body.

Hi, thanks :) I didn't get any replies when I updated my last progress so the thread kind of lost momentum! It's pretty much all sorted so I'll get some updates sorted here tonight. On a side note, I think it's a shame the F18 stick is so expensive, I understand its a niche market you'd think that the only real cost is casting the grip itself, all the other switches etc seem to be pretty much bought over from the warthog. I feel like I got a great deal now as given it's £200 for just the handle, I bought the throttle and stick new on Amazon for £265 about 3 years ago! :joystick:

I seem to have spent forever trying to work out why my VR experience is so disappointing, I have a few questions that hopefully can help manage my expectations. My system is 4790k@ 4.7ghz, Msi 2080ti @ 2100mhz and +900mhz vram 16gb ddr3 @ 2400mhz, Samsung evo SSD. I use a Samsung odyssey plus but in DCS I seem to be losing so much potential FPS somewhere as I average about 50% utilisation on my GPU and my CPU fluctuates around 35-50% usage. When I set core affinity to 2 cores, it's still not 100% on either of those cores. I'll screenshot my settings later but I just can't get more usage from my system. The shimmering is getting to me and is taking some enjoyment away. I play unpopulated no combat single player or multiplayer with just me, a friend and a tanker flying about. I have installed the shades mod but it made little difference as I can crank MSAA from 0 to 4x without affecting fps as I guess the 2080ti has no issue with it. I'm thinking maybe CPU or memory so would initially like to discuss which settings destroy those potential bottle necks. I know it's hard to recommend anything until I post my settings so I'll do that as soon as I can. Thanks for any input and suggestions. Also, I've seen people achieve much higher FPS albeit with a newer CPU but I can run my 4790k at 5ghz and still no difference which I assume isn't miles away from a lower clocked 9700k is it?

Indeed, is for me too :joystick:

Ah nice, get saving for a better gpu, the difference with high pixel density and better visuals is awesome. Good luck with it.

Might need more than luck hehe. It will be great to experience it initially and get that incredible feeling of immersion and actually being in the plane but that really does quickly go when you are using that hardware, like I said, I had the exact same hardware generation wise but more shaders and significantly higher cpu clock. Also I had 2000mhz cl8 ram which for a long time was the fastest you could get for DDR3, I was so desperate to get it playable that I swapped it for 2400mhz cl11 and certainly had a good improvement but it then came down the the 290x, it's still relevant in 1080p games but for VR in DCS it's just not up to the job. It sent my DCS experience back to the graphics of 2004! Terrible draw distances and what felt like 10 pixel jaggies which shimmer you into submission. If you get a rift, at least get it from Amazon because of their awesome returns policy, forget the CV1 as it's well worth saving a little longer to get the rift S and maybe consider a 2nd hand GTX1080 first. Spending £400 on a headset that you can't use is a bigger waste of money than spending it on a 2nd hand card then saving for a rift s :thumbup: If by chance you're in Devon, give me a shout and you can try a 290 with VR and see for yourself. I truly was disappointed.

Hi, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news but you are going to seriously struggle to get a good experience from that system in VR, I had a 290x (watercooled and overclocked) with 16gb of 2400mzh ddr3 running with my 4790k overclocked to 4.8GHz and with a rift, it was horrible, just not enough horsepower to run higher pixel density and that was at CV1 resolutions, I guess you're looking at the rift s now as the cv1 has been EOL I upgraded to a 2080ti at 2100mhz and it still struggles with my Samsung odyssey+ My biggest issue now is that my cpu can't feed the gpu with enough to maintain 45fps at reasonable settings. I really couldn't handle the extreme poor quality so sent the rift back until I could get a better system, yours is significantly slower too. It will work but will look painfully bad and shimmer like crazy. If you've not tried it though, even at low FPS it's incredible but it will just leave you wanting more and possibly disappointed. It really is that bad with the 290 and 4th gen I5/7 Also, that memory config may well not be working in dual channel, what have you got fitted?

So to start off with the actual manufacturing, the first components to be machined were the collective arm, collar / adaptor and the brass bearings. The arm it's self was straight forward as it's just 20mm ID stainless tube, placed on a lathe and polished up. The next part was the adaptor to connect the Merlin collective handle to the stainless arm. Throughout the project one of my main priorities is to not change or machine anything from the actual helicopter part and to adapt the design to meet this requirement. To me, this grip is something special, unique (at the moment) and not to be butchered. The collar has a simple diameter step down and uses grub screws to secure it neatly to the collective grip, luckily even though the grip is ergonomically shaped, right at the end, the casting feathers off to a perfect circle which allows for a seamless transition between the grip and the adaptor. The pictures above show the adaptor collar fitted to the collective grip, my friend did an amazing job with this and the transition is exact, he's 100 miles away from me so I picked up some nice accurate vernier calipers and sent lots of photos and measurements. The bearings were also machined, they're turned down from solid brass. the picture below shows the 'top hat' shape which allows them to be pressed in to 10mm stainless steel side plates and sit flush with the outside. It's also possible to see the threaded top hat which will house the grub screw that will engage with the pot to calibrate / zero it. Due to a slight miscommunication the other bearing was machined all the way through but luckily my friend was kind enough to turn down another with the top still on, this was both for looks and functionality though as it means that I can pack the bearings with silicone grease and it will have no route to escape.

Oh, and i forgot to say, I have the same damper as you FragBum, I'm really impressed with how the collective feels with it attached, thanks to everyone who suggested these.

:thumbup:Thanks I had originally designed it with bearings like yours but my engineer friend who did the machining for me insisted brass bearings and a stainless axle were the way to go and now I have it here I can see why, the precision is second to none and the action is so smooth, I'm very happy with the outcome. Thanks for the link to yours, I'll get going on your whole thread this evening, or at least up to speed as I think I read a lot of it before I became ill. Also, update to follow shortly. :joystick:

Hi everyone, it's been a crazy long time since my last update and I apologise to anyone who was following my project, it's been a roller coaster year of recovery from meningitis but I'm glad to be back with some huge updates and progress on my collective! To keep things in the spirit of a build log and also to make sure I don't spend the next few hours here posting, I'll be updating the thread over the next few days. First of all, we left of in the design stages with some really helpful replies above, thanks guys, I ended up going for this damper https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Black-HI-Q-255MM-Universal-Steering-Damper-Stabilizer-For-Honda-Yamaha-Kawasaki-/112487139526?hash=item1a30c188c6 although it seems to have gone up £15 since I bought it, it's a really nice damper though, very smooth feeling and seems well built. Next up came some more 3D plans, the video below shows what was pretty close to the final design. I decided to try and integrate everything into the body itself to keep it looking clean and simple, initially I'd been looking at using belts and pulleys to connect the potentiometer but I'm much more happy with the new design. Excuse the shaky video whilst I try and film my projector screen with one hand and dissemble the model with the mouse in the other! So the main axle is made up of two pieces, the pot sits inside and is secured by it's bolt, there is then a screwdriver type pin that threads through the brass bearing and engages in the end of the pot. as it is threaded, it can be adjusted to zero and calibrate the collective angles from the hardware side before refining it in software with dead zones. The other side houses the brake mechanism. So I stuck with the electro magnet and used the caliper and disc type principal. The magnet is housed within the side plate and slides freely to allow it to grip on to the inside of the disc. In my testing I'm able to get some serious clamping force from it and am really happy with it's performance, i accidentally left it on for a few hours and when I came back to it, it was hot but not too hot, it inadvertently had an epic stress test and passed with flying colours! The lever bar itself that connects to the collective grip is sized to accommodate the 50 odd cables coming from the grip and then an adapter collar will be used to step up the diameter to the existing OD of the Merlin grip. That's it for today, I'll get cracking on with uploading more pictures soon...

This is me :lol: Although I have a 4790kOC and holidays booked so I can't pull the trigger just yet!