Giving your Sided Winder Force Feedback 2 Steroids

[Phantom_Mark]

On 6/2/2014 at 6:40 PM, Whiplash said:

I've posted a few pictures before on my extended stick mod for my SWFFB2 but I'm going to try and combine all my mods to my stick here in this post. If you are interested in doing any of these mods yourself but could use a little more details let me know and I'll be happy to fill in the blanks.

 

I did three basic things:

 

• Increase the length of my stick.
• rerouted a base button to the top of my stick for a shift/modifier key.
• Increase the current to the force feedback motors to compensate for the longer stick.

 

 

Starting off, I cut the very base of the joystick and bent an aluminum tube I got at homedepot to fit my arrangement. I cut and drilled out the center of a bolt (for the wire to pass threw) to fasten the stick to the aluminum tube. By the time I was done it looked something:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: This was my first attempt at making a longer handle, I have since reduce the length by maybe 4" from the time I took this picture.

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I didn't waste time making a mount for my chair as you can tell by its quality. However, you can see with this setup the four base buttons on the stick are pretty much useless. I wanted to add a shift/modifier button that I could easily access with one hand so I tapped into one of the base buttons like so:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then made a small hole in the stick and added a button. I'm not terribly happy with the final outcome of this mod so I will probably improve on it later. For now, it service its purpose.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After flying with this setup for a while one thing became really apparent. The added length in the stick significantly reduce the force feedback and centering force effect of the joystick. Taking guidance from these instructions I made a plan to fix this problem:

 

http://www.simprojects.nl/ms_siderwinder_ff2_hack.htm

 

I will try to spare everyone the technical mumbo-jumbo but basically if you want to double the current to the motors you need reduce the resistance to the current sense resisters. This might not make sense to some but adding another resister in parallel will reduce the original resistance "R" by 1/(1/R+1/R). since the original resistance it actually 1 ohm simply adding another 1 ohm resister to the original one will halve the resistance of the original circuit thus doubling the current which essentially puts the stick on steroids.

 

Now some would say that this will be hard on the motors and the rest of the components of the circuit. And to that I would say, you are absolutely correct. However, I contacted the guy who originally did this mod and told him my plan. He actually added better MOSFET's and capacitors to the circuit to account for the increase current, but his setup required him to quadruple the force. Simply put, if you just want to double the current the the circuit board and motors seem to handle it just fine without over heating. If you wish to go bigger you might want to consider adding a fan or something because heat becomes the real problem. So enough about that here is what I did:

 

A flat panel resister looks like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To reduce the resistance as I explained earlier you just need to stack another flat resister on top of the eight that I highlighted in the picture below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I ordered my resisters off ebay, I think I got over 100 1 ohm roisters for like $7 or something cheap like that. I have been using my stick with these mods, all of about a week now. I have not noticed any over heating issues yet and there is definitely a noticeable difference in the force of the stick. I'll continue to update this every once in a while to track if this mod significantly reduces the life of the stick. Right now my FFB2 is my back up stick (although now its the only one I fly with) so if it decide to crap out on me at least I got more use out of it instead of it just taking up space on my shelf.

Holy thread revivals

I am doing the resistor mod now (well getting an expert to solder them for me)

When you say "Add a 1ohm resistor to each of these" do you literally mean add 1ohm to the existing 1ohm resistors already in those spots, thus making the total 2ohms ?? or am I misunderstanding here , could the existing 1ohm be replaced with a 2ohm is the question in that case?  

thanks

[Lt_Jaeger]

If you add a 1 Ohm resistor to the already mounted one in parallel, you have a 0.5 Ohm resistance afterward, which would, to my understanding, the goal.