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sydost

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Everything posted by sydost

  1. Thanks for confiming my thoughts. I won't be doing anything really competitive. Low midpack iRacing is probably the most competitive I do and it really doesn't matter how well I do there as it is just for fun as everything else. To me it seems that those Samsung screens give out the 20ms display lags with game mode on which drops the chroma to 4:2:2 from 4:4:4. This whole chroma thing is something I really don't understand very well. Does it matter or will I notice it if I am sitting a meter away from the screen? Well, hopefully I'll have enough money at the end of the year to do the upgrade. Got to upgrade the whole computer before I can go to 4K.
  2. What do you guys think about the display lag of the modern 4K TVs for gaming use? At least according to displaylag.com the new Samsung curved UHD TVs at sizes 55 and 65 inches have quite good figures (around 20ms). My gut feeling is that it doesn't really matter much for flight simming but is that good enough for other games (mainly racing sims and occassional FPS).
  3. I don't think that it matters where the trim command is coming from. I have the trim mapped on my Cougar trim switch and my MSFFB2 trims properly.
  4. Very nice job. Have you seen this thread about increasing the power. http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=125281
  5. Hello Gents, just as a reminder that there actually is plenty of equipment out there with a different operating logic than the industry norm I can tell you that in my daily driver the flight director is very much influenced by the selected course during the capture phase of an ILS approach. Though, no influence on the tracking phase. That in mind I would not be so quick to judge that the flight director modelling in DCS A-10C is absolutely wrong. Probably something that should be looked into or confirmed but it might even be possible that it could work like the real deal.
  6. If swap axis is not set your elevator trim trims the aileron and aileron trim trims elevator. I think trimming is pretty much the only effect which the swap axis affects. Except maybe the over G shake on SFM FC3 aircraft but it doesn't matter which way it shakes. In Mig-15 module I had to also invert the pitch axis FF effects to get the pitch trim to work in correct direction. To configure swapping and invert settings you need to just test it out and see which combination gives the proper outcome for trimming. My experience is such that swap axis should be on for every module.
  7. And I think before the boards there were the Flanker mailing list (ca 1996). :)
  8. You mean this one? I think I still have it somewhere. Need to try it out and see if still works with Win7. I think my first was ACE II for C64. Of course the best part being the music by Rob Hubbard :) . Also remember playing Solo Flight with my dad. Then later came the PC stuff like Falcon AT, Red Baron, Falcon 3.0, etc and eventually Su-27 Flanker as the first ED title I played.
  9. A good way to improve the frankenstick is to increase the force by doing the Whiplash's steroid upgrade to both units. I did it couple months ago and it was a very needed force upgrade. Here is the Whiplash's thread http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=125281 I have around 30cm extension, the heavy Cougar grip on top of that and of course a hefty (1,8kg) counterweight so the force from double MSFFB2s was a bit weak. The steroid upgrade doubles the force from both units so there should be four times the original force now and it feels a lot better now.
  10. Yes it is quite easy but there is no point in doing it. There has been some discussion about it earlier. MSFFB2 uses some sort of optical sensors instead of traditional pots and practically those are as good as hall sensors. So I'd say not worth the trouble.
  11. Ross59, could you explain how you fixed this issue? I and probably quite many others are also having this problem.
  12. Here is one more link to the Gene's hall sensor mod from simhq. It has some good discussion on page two about the principles on how to apply it to a joystick which has quite small angle to measure. http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3225807/2 Edit: Also this one has good info about the linearity issue around the midpart of the article. http://www.mycockpit.org/forums/content.php?r=172-Mikes-Tips-(Rotary)-Hall-Position-Sensors
  13. Hi, here are couple of examples. http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=1428398&postcount=50 On this one the magnets are steady and the sensor moves with the stick. http://www.simpits.org/geneb/?p=299 http://www.mycockpit.org/forums/showthread.php?t=22267 I've mostly used this type of installation where the sensor is steady inside a tube and the magnets rotate around the sensor. The benefit of this one is that it gives almost linear response within about 40 degrees of rotation. Hope these give some ideas. I think there are other ways to do it but I think these are the most useful ones.
  14. Ok now I have split the MSFFB2 potentiometers to the Leo Bodnar board I have and also I've had some freetime to do a bit of testing too. The 12-bit Bodnar board reads around 3460 steps on the stick's movement range which I think is very good. As I used the Bodnar board which is in my pedals I have quite a long cable between the stick and the pedals and there is also two 9-pin D-connectors there. Well it wasn't optimal way of doing it since the long cable and connectors add quite a bit of interference to the signal. It shows up as a constant jitter on the controller output. The jitter is usually within 6 steps so not very much considering the range. The jitter was reduced to 1 step when I tried to set the Bodnar board inside the stick box and only 20cm wire between the pot and the circuit board. So what I did was that I soldered an additional wire to the potentiometers center leg and routed that to the input pin on the Bodnar board. As KLR Rico suggested that I should ground the circuit boards I also connected the ground pin of the Bodnar board to the potentiometers ground pin on the X axis. I think that should ground the circuit boards together but frankly I am not exactly sure. The jitter doesn't really affect flying very much. A small vibration can be seen in the virtual stick. Main reason for me to do this mod was to get rid of the deadzone in the controls and I have to say that it feels very much better. I think it is much closer to real aircraft controls where you can fly the aircraft with very small and accurate inputs near the center of the stick. At the moment biggest problem with my stick is that I desperately need more force. At the moment I am happy with the solution of having the Bodnar board on my pedals but probably on later stage of my project I will buy another 12-bit board (Teensy, Bodnar or something else) and have it inside the stick box. Today I finally received the 1ohm resistors I had ordered for the additional force. Guess what, I had ordered the very tiny size resistors even I tried to be very careful to order the correct size. Well, I ordered new ones today but probably have to wait again three weeks before I get them. So I think now its time to fly while waiting. I'll send you a PM next time I'm coming to Denmark and come pick it up :) .
  15. Yes it needs to be split and yes MSFFB2 needs the info from the pots for the FFB to work. I made a small test and it seems to be enough that only the center leg of the pot (output) is attached to the Leo's board if the MSFFB2 is powered. The MSFFB2 provides the +5V and GND references. On my test the Leo's board read something around 3500 steps from the pot. What I didn't test is that does the splitting have negative effect to the pot values the MSFFB2 reads. My understanding of electronics says that it shouldn't affect it but then again my understanding isn't very much. So it remains to be seen how it works.
  16. You can use Leo's board for input in DCS so yes that increases the input resolution and in DCS you will still have the force feedback working on the MSFFB2. The MSFFB2s actual force feedback will still probably be based on 1024 steps but I don't see that as a very big problem. As I tryed to explain earlier, in DCS the force feedback effects work even if you use another controller for the input. On other games it doesn't work that way. I happen to already have that Leo's board on my pedals so at the moment I am just waiting for connectors to arrive so I can build a nice looking cable between my stick and pedals to try it out.
  17. Thanks! Seems to be an earlier 3.2 version though. Probably I need to improve my googling skills as I missed that one.
  18. Yeah, that is the way I would do it. Only grey and white needed for the switch.
  19. I'd say the dark red is +5V. The pink one is ground but ground isn't used at all in the sensing diode system.
  20. I tested it earlier and if I remember correctly you should put the switch between white and grey wires. Sorry, cannot confirm it now as I don't have those wires attached at the moment. The system keeps the power on all the time when the circuit is open. When the circuit is closed it cuts the power. If you want I can test it to confirm the correct wires but it requires a bit of additional work. Here is the wiring diagram for the stick if that helps http://www.simprojects.nl/ms_siderwinder_ff2_hack.htm
  21. Probably my lousy explanation and this one probably ain't better. Yeah of course the best solution would be to have the SWFFB2 with better resolution too but I think that is not possible. What I meant is that you can use a board with better resolution for inputs to DCS. That way you will get more accurate flying inputs. The force feedback will be the same as before. From DCS control setup you would set pitch and roll assignments to the warthog board and leave the SWFFB2 axis assignments empty. If you are unfamiliar with this one you can test it by plugging the SWFFB2 and Warthog to the computer and putting the assignments in DCS the way I described. You can fly with the warthog but the SWFFB2 will still do all the FFB effects even it isn't assigned as a control. In a test like this you will mainly see shaking when stalling and changing center position when trimming. You can use any input device in DCS for pitch and roll and DCS will send the same FFB commands to all FFB devices that are connected to the computer. So it was only a solution to have better resolution for DCS. And yes I was thinking about splitting the same optical sensor to the other board.
  22. The deadzone isn't actually as big as it feels when flying. It seems to be about 1,5cm or half an inch measured from the top of my stick. But I find it is a bit annoying especially when flying level. For example when accelerating from low speed and trying to steadily push nose down to keep level flight there suddenly is a small part of stick travel where nothing happens. Initially I had the hall sensors on my top FFB set as roll and pitch input through the Cougar for extra resolution. I felt that it was very easy to fly precisely in the center portion of the stick when there wasn't this deadzone on the inputs. Later I found out that the Cougar is only 10-bit system like Sidewinder so I didn't get any extra resolution with that and to make it work well it would have needed a lot of adjustment of the hall sensor mod. At the moment my next plan is to use left over axis channels on my pedal's Bodnar board for pitch and roll. I am going to take that input from the Sidewinder's own optical sensor so same position info is going to the Sidewinder and Bodnar board. That way I will have 12-bit resolution and get rid of the deadzone if I want to. So it will (hopefully) be almost perfect solution. It might be a good idea to consider doing the same thing with the Warthog as it also has quite a bit more resolution than the Sidewinder. The reason why I am so keen to get rid of the deadzone is that I believe there would be a more defined center position with the FFB if the FFB would receive accurate position in the center of the stick. I think so too. I don't have the resistors yet so need to wait a while. I am a bit put off when thinking about slodering those tiny resistors :) .
  23. Yep, it has or at least both of my two units have. I think it is hardcoded in to the drivers. My understanding is that it used to be adjustable with the software provided with the stick but unfortunately Microsoft didn't update the program for newer operating systems. Hmm... well that is weird. I actually asked the simprojects.nl guy does he have that deadzone and he too said that he hasn't noticed such thing but he changed the original pots (or optical sensors). That is why I thought I should try the hall sensor mod. I wouldn't say it is a downgrade. I would say it is pretty much equal or it can be made equal. There is the linearity issue, but you can easily make it almost linear (something like 98% linear which is enough for my controllers) by using only the linear part of the sine curve the hall sensor produces (depends on the magnet placement). Also it is rather easy to get the full resolution (1024 in this case) from a hall effect sensor just by using strong enough magnets to oversaturate the sensor to have full resolution available on the range you intend to use. I have done my hall sensors with this method http://www.mycockpit.org/forums/showthread.php?t=22267 . I mean that I have two magnets on the rotating axis and then I have put the sensor inside the tube.
  24. May I ask you why you want to change the pots to hall sensors? My understanding is that MSFFB2 uses optical sensors instead of pots. To me those seem to have good accuracy and don't suffer from spiking or wear which is the usual reason to change to hall sensors. Yesterday I tried to change one of my MSFFB2 original pots to hall sensor just to try to get rid of the deadzone in the Sidewinder. The hall sensor worked fine but didn't solve the deadzone problem. Other than that I haven't figured out why hall sensors would be preferable and I removed the whole hall sensor mod I had made. By the way I used Allegro A1302 hall sensors and those seemed to work fine with the Sidewinder. How has your stick been holding up with the increased force mod? I have a PeterP style frankenstick with two sets of MSFFB2 and a Cougar grip and a counter weight. The Cougar grip + counter weight is so heavy that the force seems to be quite weak and I was thinking of doing your increased force mod too.
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