question regarding f 14 spider detent (emergency wing sweep handle)

[draconus]

43 minutes ago, Gareth Barry said:

...nothing for the throttle position on autopilot - so I was thinking of getting that indirectly from eg the engine rpm or fuel flow?

Real autothrottle does it with relation to AoA keeping it within 15 UAoA but I get that you'd want it to synchronize with the in game throttle.

Edited November 8, 2023 by draconus

[Elo]

3 hours ago, Gareth Barry said:

Thanks Elo

Perhaps you can clarify - my (mis?)understanding was that flightpanels is specific for interacting with saitec equipment? When I was looking through the DCS BIOS commands for the f14 I was very surprised to see that there is nothing for the throttle position on autopilot - so I was thinking of getting that indirectly from eg the engine rpm or fuel flow?

Youre right, those guys made some software for use with LG/Saitek stuff, but they also made their own branch of DCS BIOS, which the above link should lead to. They also have a great discord server with lots of people willing to help with code https://discord.gg/5svGwKX, and a wiki for help with installation https://github.com/DCS-Skunkworks/DCSFlightpanels/wiki

I get home in a couple of hours and ill check the control reference for throttle position. There should be some kind of output for that. I dont think using RPM of fuel flow would work since those vary with other factors outside the throttle position and would be delayed too.

EDIT:

@Gareth Barry found it:

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Edited November 8, 2023 by Elo

[Gareth Barry]

Elo, thank you so much, this is extremely helpful. I will definitely go the flightpanels route.

[Gareth Barry]

Some updates, got the wing sweep handle printed and functioning. To be honest, I was rather shocked at how well it works, especially given how little and fiddly the parts are. When the handle is extended, the little spring loaded latch flicks out and slots into the '4 degree notches.' I am using a thin strip of carbon fibre as the spring. The handle still has to be painted greay, with the yellow and black striping on the upper part of the handle.

You can see in the above shot how the shape of the latch allows it to slip under the notches when being pulle dup, but not when being pushed down. In order to stow the handle once extended, it must be put into the 20 degree or overswept position. And here is a shot of the whole thing almost fully assembled, minus the stepper motor for the wing sweep handle, which is in its mount in the background.

[Gareth Barry]

Also been working on the geometry of some of the parts, for example, the wing sweep cover is presently interfering with the wing sweep handle when in the overswept posiiton, so I have to fix that. On the whole though, some solid progress.

From a coding point of view, I have been able to;

1. Get the stepper motors to work smoothly and reliably in both directions, whilst bein easy to override by hand

2. Managed to code a way by which manually moving the throttles forwards or backwards manually when the stepper motor is turning disengages the stepper motor and then returns the updated throttle position. The GT2 belt acting as a simple clutch is working very well.

I still have to buy a leonardo and some PISO shift registers, and then figure out how ot make those work within the joystick library. I also have to get DCS BIOS to work, but I want to make sure all of the mechanicals are sorted first.

[Yogi8]

Man I love the work! You're keeping me motivated. I had to redesign and print a bunch of parts because of a fundamental change I decided to make.. but I'm getting into final assembly and wiring before teardown and paint. Hopefully by the end of this week I'll have some beauty shots and it'll be my daily driver. Until then here's a shot of this thing puking its guts out all over my kitchen table.

[Gareth Barry]

Thanks Yogi but honestly, your throttle is really on a whole different level, and if i was to go back in time, i reckon i would just print yours! However, i have learnt a heck of a lot in terms of electronics and coding, which i guess was really the point. My real hope is that i can get the autothrottle working and people can use that as an outline to do it for themselves if they so desire.

[Yogi8]

So, I’ve got an interesting issue with the Flaps. I guess DCS won’t read a potentiometer for the positioning of the flaps…? The potentiometer is being read as a switch and freaks out. DCS bios doesn’t seem to give the option for flaps being a potentiometer either.. it annoyed me to no end.. but this problem has quickly worked it’s way to last on the list of things that I care about. I’ll just use it as a rudder until I finish 3d printing rudder pedals. 

I spent about 5 days trying to get the RKJXT1F42001 to work. Hours upon hours with the joystick.h code. But I knew it was a wiring issue. All of the websites and drawings have the ground wire incorrectly labeled, which caused none of the buttons to work. Thankfully, someone posted on a website about Xbox controllers a colored version of the drawing and presto! Now I’ve got ICS PTT and Wing Sweep Auto/Aft/Bomb/FWD at my thumb. 

All of the buttons and switches and the other three potentiometers work. I can flip the exterior lights on, make the speed brake open and close, and the emergency wing sweep handle pops up and goes down…lot’s of work for a toy lol.. but it’s the little things that make me smile. 

Everything is in the “paint booth” (an empty cardboard Amazon box). Assembly this weekend if the paint’s dry! 

I’m really looking forward to seeing your autothrottles work. I already know that I’m going to redesign my entire throttle quadrant when I see yours start to slowly move on their own and my jealously creeps in! 

Keep up the great work!

[draconus]

8 hours ago, Yogi8 said:

I’ve got an interesting issue with the Flaps. I guess DCS won’t read a potentiometer for the positioning of the flaps…?

Hope it's not that, but just a reminder:

Quote

The auxiliary flaps, the innermost section, only have two positions, retracted and extended. They will extend fully when the FLAP handle is at more than 5° extension.

 

[Yogi8]

Interesting. I’ll swap out the potentiometer for a switch. I’m ok with partial functionality. 

[Gareth Barry]

**********update***********

sorry for the lack of progress, been a bit busy with work. Nevertheless, some progress has been made. All of the hardware side of things has now been hooked up and is functioning correctly, as far as I can tell. Funny how certain things that one thinks will be trivial end up being a hassle- namely, getting the magnetic field oriented correctly so that the Hall effect sensors will work properly. Got there in the end though. On the plus side, the wing sweep handle system that locks into the 4-degree notches is working perfectly. The next step is to get it working as a basic throttle, without the stepper motors moving anything- even though I have tested those on both throttles and the wing sweep-handle and they work perfectly. I have ordered an Arduino Leonardo and two CD4021B shift registers to get all the buttons to work. I'm still struggling to make sense of shift registers and the 'ShiftIn' library of Arduino - the basic joystick with the joystick.h library seems fairly simple.

 

[Gareth Barry]

Time for another update -

Been learning how to code arduinos. The problem that I had was that I don't have enough pins on one leonardo to operate all the buttons, axes and stepper motors. I tried and failed to use shift registers and I2C components. I could have tried a multiplexer, but in the end I just bough a pro-micro to handle the buttons - the Leonardo handles the axes and will also control the stepper motors. I was worried that DCS would confuse the two boards but that doesn't seem to be a problem.

Now that the axes and buttons are working, with sufficient pins to add the stepper motors, I went and installed in my crude simpit chair. Pretty happy with how it has turned out. I ran out of room in the box itself to contain the leonardo and stepper motor boards, hence you can see them poking out the front. Nevertheless, as a simple axis with all the buttons in the right place, it works. It's pretty cool to open the wingsweep cover and see the same thing happen in DCS.

 

[draconus]

12 minutes ago, Gareth Barry said:

Time for another update

Have you just mod the T16000M to handle the Tomcat grip?

btw: your spider's on the loose, or whatever it was

[Gareth Barry]

Hi Draconus

That's my son's corn snake - he handles it pretty much every day! -it actually crapped on my other son and I had to wash clothes and bedding (yuck!)

You are exactly right regarding the joystick , it's a t16000m that I replaced the 'shell' with ont that I 3d printed. It was my first foray into this world of cockpit building - and now the bug has bitten pretty hard. At first I was going to do the same thing to the t16000 throttle and use it's electronics, but i am so glad I didn't. On the one hand, I have learnt so much about microcontrollers, and have gotten my son into arduino as well. Also, who knows, maybe one day I will build another gimbal and restore the t16000m back to another more generic joystick, then I can dogfight my kids and show them who's boss. Ultimately I want to build pedals that also more closely match the tomcat's.

 

Edited December 19, 2023 by Gareth Barry

[Gareth Barry]

And now I find out that DCS BIOS doesn't work with the Leonardo...gosh. Ok, will just enjoy the throttles as they are for a week or two and will then get a nano and try to do the axes with that.

[draconus]

6 hours ago, Gareth Barry said:

At first I was going to do the same thing to the t16000 throttle and use it's electronics, but i am so glad I didn't.

I can understand that. Apart from main axes the electronics are so poor quality... first spikes begin on the rocker switch, then on the slider on the stick base, now the TDC hat started - it's just too much for a few years of casual using.

[Yogi8]

12 hours ago, Gareth Barry said:

And now I find out that DCS BIOS doesn't work with the Leonardo...gosh. Ok, will just enjoy the throttles as they are for a week or two and will then get a nano and try to do the axes with that.

I've been messing around with the arduino micro's trying to get them to work with the throttle build. The code works but it's janky as hell and I'm mulling over a different solution. I can get all of the buttons and switches to work, and the potentiometers as well, but everything is super touchy and there are ghost inputs. I've seriously thought about buying a Logitech G Saitek Pro Throttle Quadrant off of Ebay and using it for the throttles and flaps and using the arduino for buttons only. 

[Lt_Jaeger]

I use STM32 boards (blue pills) with Freejoy as software and until now I have to run into a unsolvable problem.

For my throttle build I used cheep hall sensors for axis and I was able to adjust the 2 channels for a more or less linear output, even so the input is kind off jittery and not very linear, maybe take a look at it. If you would like to integrate Stuff into DCS Bios, this would be the wrong way.

 

[Gareth Barry]

Hey Yogi

I guess we are both fighting arduino!

The first thing i will say, have you soldered the actual connections to the board? As soon as i did that i noticed an increase in stability. The other thing, are you using the Joystick.h library for a leonardo or promicro? If so, you can remap the input to reduce the resolution from 1024 to 256 bits, which also increases stability. The decrease in resolution has not made my flying any better or worse. Another thing that helps is calibration- sometimes going through the calibration makes it stable and sometimes it messes everything up- i find i just need to persist until i get a good outcome. Are you using Hall effect sensors or pots? My understanding is that a hall effect sensor has a high gain amplifier in it, so i am wondering if using shielded wire for the signal wire could help reduce interference that may be causing voltage spikes. This works well when building for example high gain guitar amplifiers (a hobby i used to have a few years ago).  I guess if nothing else, i would think that keeping the signal wire run to the microcontroller fairly short would help some. I could be wrong re the shielded wire for the signal from the hall effect sensor but i was going to try it, but good solder connections to the arduino along with calibration seemed to have made the spikes acceptable. I hope that helps?

I found out that it is possible to use a leonardo for example with the joystick.h library and still get information back from DCS bios. I dont think a leonardo can send information to dcs via dcs bios. 

[Gareth Barry]

Yogi

It seems i was right regarding using shielded wire. Essentially, the spikes on the signal wire voltages are most likely due to noise coming into the wire, be it from a faulty connection (make sure you solder the wires well) or coming into the wire from stray RF signals, for shielded wire is an excellent fix. Another thing we would sometimes do in building audio amplifiers is to twist the two power wires together, ie the ground and 5v wires running from the pot to the arduino. Another thing you can try is soldering a 1nf or so capacitor between the signal wire and ground- the higher the capacitance value the more 'smoothing' you will get of the voltage. And finally, i think another thing you can do, and a simple fix i was going to try, was to run a sub-loop in the code of the main loop, that samples say 20 readings, averages them, and then sends that as the actual output value from the throttle.

I am having some spikes as well, which i thought i had fixed, but seem to come back intermittently. Oddly enough, it doesnt seem to affect the handling of the tomcat too much, i guess the latency of the engines themselves overwhelmes any small throttle input spikes that there may be.

My bigger problem at the moment is that the two leonardos do in fact seem to be conflicting with each other, in that the button and axis mapping has to be reset everytime DCS is loaded up. Going to fix this after christmas.

I hope you get your code working Yogi! I guess if push comes to shove, you could always use a cheapish but decent PC compatible 'joystick' (the ones shaped like a playstation controller) and gut the boards inside and rewire that? Perhaps just use your arduino for any extra buttons, as i need like 16 or so on my throttle, 4 more than a PC gamepad controller. These gampad controllers i think have all sorts of filtering to make sure that the signal output is super stable. I hope this is helpful!