Aurism Posted January 26, 2022 Share Posted January 26, 2022 (edited) 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. Edited January 27, 2022 by Aurism 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
agrasyuk Posted January 26, 2022 Share Posted January 26, 2022 This is a very interesting concept of FFB addon. Good luck! Anton. My pit build thread . Simple and cheap UFC project Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
crazysundog Posted January 27, 2022 Share Posted January 27, 2022 This is great! I did end up buying a Brunner last year, but used a MSFFB2 for 11 years before that. My solution was mashing a CH combat stick on it. Good work! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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