Repairing Saitek Pro Flight Rudder Pedals with hall sensors and 3D prints

[rel4y]

Hello friends,

 

Over the years I have had some trouble with my Saitek Pro Flight Rudder Pedals. In principal it is a thing of the past now, as I replaced them with a set of BRD MS3 rudder pedals as seen here. Buuuut I like to fix stuff instead of throwing it out in the bin and so I finally completely repaired them. Initially I bought these for around 40 bucks on ebay with a broken foot brake axis in 2014 or something. Two of the grey plastic brake axis holders were broken and I tried glueing these together with superglue. As you can guess it lasted about 5 mins before breaking again. So my temporary fix was to switch out on of the broken holders to the other brake axis and replaced it with the intact one I took out. With both brakes now having one broken and one intact holder it was a bit wobbly, but it worked ok for more than two years.

 

Then finally the crappy Saitek pot in the left foot axis choose to go to pot heaven and irreversibly broke down. Now there was no easy fix around as spare pots with only 30° rotation angle can be ordered nowhere on this planet. So I read about every second post of Sokol in the interwebs and ordered some Allegro A1324 hall sensors, some Neodymium magnets and actually a ton of other electronics stuff as well. :D I took the pedals apart, cleaned them, drilled out a few parts of the footbreak, broke some others off, glued my fingers to the thing several times, bent everything into shape, tested, took everything apart and started over, et voila.. the sucker is doing again what it seized to do a while ago. Now the good news is it actually works with contactless hall sensors, with the original Saitek firmware and electronics and has zero wear whatsoever. It is still quite DIY at the moment, but I am actually working on a drop in solution which should be done soon.

 

While I was at it I also wanted to fix the broken brake axis holders. So next step was to design a 3D model and print it via Shapeways. The 3D printed parts luckily fit well, maybe a bit tight overall. I adjusted the tolerances in the model and now it should be perfect.

 

Now for the fun part, the photos. Enjoy! :thumbsup:

 

 

The cables were taped down later with some electric tape for a cleaner and practical cable management.

 

 

Edit: In case anybody needs it here is the Shapeways link. https://www.shapeways.com/product/6H...shop-inventory

Edited December 8, 2017 by rel4y