I fly helicopters in DCS and X-plane, and found myself torn between having either force trim and electronic damping/friction on the Microsoft Sidewinder FFB 2 joystick, or the magnetic sensors and increased button count of the VKB Gunfighter MkIII. I resolved to design a way to rig them both together to get the combined benefit. This gradually grew into a design for a complete collapsible simpit with a collective and retractable wheels. Happy to say that after a few iterations, the Proteus Simpit and Puppetmaster joystick designs are ready for initial release!
Plans: https://github.com/aurism/proteus-simpit
More cost details are in the repo, but here are the bottom lines:
Full up Cost of Proteus Simpit: $1483
Cost of Proteus Simpit without Gunfighter MkIII or collective: $721
Full up Cost of Standalone Puppetmaster Joystick: $892
Cost of Standalone Puppetmaster Joystick without Gunfighter MkIII: $433
The standalone Puppetmaster joystick is less than half the cost of a Brunner FFB gimbal with stick, and because it uses the original Microsoft Force Feedback 2 PCB, the Puppetmaster also supports all original DirectInput force feedback effects. Currently, the VKB Gunfighter MkIII with stick extension is used as the flight stick, but you could modify the design to support any other flight stick with a stick extension.
To use in DCS, connect both sticks to your computer, map your flight controls to the Gunfighter axes and buttons, and remove all mappings from the Microsoft FFB stick. Provided force feedback is enabled in DCS, the game will still drive force feedback commands to any FFB stick it finds, including the Microsoft FFB stick. In practice, I actually use SimFFB to drive FFB commands more often than using DCS.
