Cyber Taurus FFB base

[Dogmanbird]

1 hour ago, propeler said:

My prediction - 60Nm is a false statement. And 20Nm on DD as well. 

it wouldn't be a chinese ad if there wasn't at least one overhyped detail or something totally misleading

[Dogmanbird]

i think this could be DIY-ed with hoverboard motors directly driven, while maintaining the thin profile. would look slightly different but still close

 they are having a go which is great imo

 

Edited March 17 by Dogmanbird

[propeler]

1 hour ago, Aapje said:

Then again, if the 60 Nm version actually has 16 Nm motors

Sorry, Messed up with DD version. 16Nm on DD is bit more reasonable. But price still bother me.  What bother me even more - that pedals are priced more correctly. They have put there 1 motor which looks like Fanatec DD motor and price increased to the pedals without it about 500$... That's look way more realistic. What about the price of joystick base - looks like price dumping and price wars with competitors. It just can not be so cheap if to make them to be profitable.

[Dragon1-1]

8 hours ago, Panzerlang said:

Mine has a 20cm extension. Even with that, it's like the stick is in almost-set concrete beyond 500kmh. If the force is set lower it makes the stick feel too weak at lower speeds, so realism trumps convenience.

It sounds like a configuration issue. 500kph is 270kts, far from speeds at which even a Bf-109 (infamous for relatively high stick forces) should become uncontrollable. For realism, this should be a per-aircraft configuration, taking into account actual control forces at various speeds.

31 minutes ago, propeler said:

It just can not be so cheap if to make them to be profitable.

I think the gearbox is doing way more heavy lifting on the stick than with the pedals. If the quality remains good, a price war isn't a terrible thing for the customers. Problems start when corner cutting does, but we'll see if that's the case here.

Edited March 17 by Dragon1-1

[Aapje]

@propeler

As we can see elsewhere on this forum, they very much cheap out on such things as support and following consumer law. And they are also undercutting the competition quite a bit when it comes to their other products, like the Ursa Minor, and their panels.

So I think that it is safe to say that they are indeed fighting a price war with the competition. So in the case of Winwing, I would definitely suggest: caveat emptor.

However, the big upside is that their products seem to generally be fairly solidly designed and the assembly is not too bad. So that puts them far ahead of Logitech/Saitek and the cheaper Trustmaster stuff in my opinion.

But I would demand better price/performance to choose a Winwing product over one of the more reputable brands. But when it comes to FFB, we only have Moza, which has a rather mediocre reputation, at least to me, and the Rhino/Beast, which are rather costly, as they don't seem to benefit from optimized factory methods. As I think I said before to you, I think that your lack of experience with higher-volume factory methods (and cheap Chinese labor), leads you to consistently overestimate how expensive things have to be.

But ultimately, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say, so we'll have to see how the Cyber Taurus performs in practice.

I do think that with my comment above, I have figured out at least in part why the 20 Nm version is so cheap and why the 16 Nm version is much more expensive, but we need customer testimony to see whether we pay a price for the gearing solution in terms of quality and if so, how much so.

Especially since @Dogmanbird correctly remarks that Chinese marketing is not the most honest (then again, US marketing often isn't either).

Edited March 17 by Aapje

[Nightdare]

1 hour ago, Aapje said:

Chinese marketing is not the most honest (then again, US marketing often isn't either).

But my 5070 is just as powerful as a 4090!!!!1!!! 

[ebabil]

will we be able to use Taurus on the table?

Jokes aside, my hopes are melting away for a normal size ffb stick like msffb2 or logi g940. I am not a torque chaser. just wanna have it for helis.

[Dogmanbird]

 

my hopes are melting away for a normal size ffb stick like msffb2 or logi g940. I am not a torque chaser. just wanna have it for helis.

the vpf folk on discord must have re invented the wheel dozens of times over and used some smaller motors and smaller gimbals, albeit everything plastic i think, but that wouldn't matter for what you are looking for. I'm pretty sure someone there could build something compact for what you need, or guide you through it.

Would something this size be acceptable? 

if you want a lower profile base (though it would have a bigger footprint) you could do what i did and put the motors level or slightly higher than the gimbal.

I've got 3 vkb gunfighter bases that are now pretty much redundant. I was considering using some small motors and experiment with modifying one of them (belt and rod arrangement) to use ffb with no stick extension, as a challenge. might be enough force for trim in a chopper or some gentle feedback in jets

Edited March 17 by Dogmanbird

[Aapje]

1 hour ago, ebabil said:

Jokes aside, my hopes are melting away for a normal size ffb stick like msffb2 or logi g940. I am not a torque chaser. just wanna have it for helis.

We are still early in the life cycle of these products. Only one proper company has made one and they are still doing a lot of development on it. Others don't have their hardware out yet, let alone have a mature solution.

Only once the expensive bases start to mature, can you expect a move towards lower end solutions.

[ebabil]

17 hours ago, Aapje said:

We are still early in the life cycle of these products. Only one proper company has made one and they are still doing a lot of development on it. Others don't have their hardware out yet, let alone have a mature solution.

Only once the expensive bases start to mature, can you expect a move towards lower end solutions.

hope your pov is right and they will evolve their tech accordingly. however, this tech is acually pretty old. 

there are some 15-20 years old ffb sticks in the market. for steering wheels, market is a ffb heaven from belt mechanism to direct drive etc. 

[Aapje]

1 hour ago, ebabil said:

hope your pov is right and they will evolve their tech accordingly. however, this tech is acually pretty old. 

there are some 15-20 years old ffb sticks in the market. for steering wheels, market is a ffb heaven from belt mechanism to direct drive etc. 

The issue is that they stopped making them for a long time, so most of the expertise disappeared, and the products did not evolve along with new technology. So things mostly have to be build up from scratch (both hardware and drivers).

There are only some benefits to the older FFB sticks, like there being a market of older dudes who remember it fondly and who are eager to buy them and who advocate for it, and directFFB support in some games, although that was made for the crappy sticks of the past, and is not really up to snuff for the much better hardware of today.

It makes little sense to make a lower-end option, until the drivers are worked out and people figure out what hardware solutions are best, and software like MSFS and DCS add/improve support for FFB. Lower-end customers are often more demanding than the higher end customers, when it comes to having a perfected experience, and there is also less room to experiment on the low-end, since it needs high volumes to make a lower-end offering work out financially.

[ebabil]

so those who want to use ffb sticks, they have to live with these humongous devices

[Hiob]

2 minutes ago, ebabil said:

so those who want to use ffb sticks, they have to live with these humongous devices

There are choices. Some are reasonable in size like the Moza or the Rhino. But none is suited for sitting on the desktop. 

[Aapje]

1 hour ago, ebabil said:

so those who want to use ffb sticks, they have to live with these humongous devices

For now, yes, unless you buy a second-hand MS FFB2. Big motors take a lot of space, and everything else has to be beefy too, to cope with the forces.

But it would be possible to make a much weaker desktop version, although it would also not be as nice as the bigger bases.

In theory you could make a low desktop version with lots of power by more or less putting the Winwing base on its side, or even by switching to pneumatic motors with an external air supply, but it's doubtful that these would sell. And you would need to clamp it down very well. A big draw of desktop devices is that you can just plonk it on a desk and go fly.

Edited March 18 by Aapje

[Dragon1-1]

2 hours ago, Aapje said:

The issue is that they stopped making them for a long time, so most of the expertise disappeared, and the products did not evolve along with new technology. So things mostly have to be build up from scratch (both hardware and drivers).

For what it's worth, the expertise was mostly confined to Logitech and Microsoft, IIRC due to the latter having a death grip on the patents that enabled FFB joysticks. It was never widespread and petered out because of that (I think it stayed around in some Logitech steering wheels). The patents have expired a few years ago, which is why we're seeing a resurgence from an entirely different class of hardware manufacturers. However, the solutions need to be created from scratch.

[Aapje]

@Dragon1-1

I think that it was a combination of things, with the biggest factor being the general decline in flight simming, which caused a huge drop in demand for controllers. All these big and small companies that used to release new joysticks and such, either left the market or stopped innovating and kept selling products that became more and more obsolescent.

We saw only some niche companies that kept innovating, and these companies clearly didn't aim for a mass market. We can see this by them avoiding the regular retail channel and selling direct to customer, which is a good move for niche products with a small but motivated consumer base, that will find the products even if they are not in local stores. And this way they kept costs relatively low, despite not manufacturing in very large numbers.

But these niche companies like Virpil and VKB couldn't afford to make big gambles. A small company like VKB clearly has their hands full simply to develop relatively traditional products like the STECS, which has some very nice innovative features, but which is not really a revolutionary design.

I think that sim racing actually saw a big decline in customers too (although less than flight simming), but the benefit of FFB is so enormous on the racing side (or rather, non-FFB racing wheels are so bad) that customers simply wouldn't accept anything less, while many flight simmers were happy with decent mechanical bases. But even there we saw that the big companies stagnated, suggesting that demand went down so much that they didn't want to invest in R&D anymore, and we saw innovation by small companies that no longer exist like LeoBodnar and OSW, and then a mid-sized company (Fanatec) pushing that innovation more into the mainstream with direct drive steering wheels.

Note that these patents, which were not actually owned by MS, but by Immersion Corp, never held back FFB on the racing sim side. In general, patents only have value if you either can stop people from competing with your product, or have them pay licensing fees. There is no benefit to doing nothing with the patents. So companies probably just thought there was too little interest in FFB sticks anymore to even keep selling the same FFB sticks, let alone innovate.

However, one of the biggest downsides of patents is that they can stifle very small innovators that never sell in large numbers. It's generally not worth the effort by patent holders to license their patent to these people, but it can be a risk to their patent to not send a cease and desist.

A possibility is that the VPForce and FFBeast guys, who are basically just a guy in a shed, felt hindered by the patents, and only really got going once the patents expired. And it's often very passionate people like that, who take gambles that established companies won't make, and then prove the viability of those innovations. Then bigger companies notice that and copy it. And often not the biggest companies, but the mid-sized companies that are looking for a way to take down the leader(s).

This is why we see Moza and Winwing adopt FFB for flight simming, and not Thrustmaster and Logitech. And we see the same on the racing sim side, where Fanatec/Simagic/Moza/etc adopted direct drive way before Thrustmaster and Turtle Beach. And because the established companies jumped in so late, their products are often underwhelming. You actually see the same with the Thrustmaster AVA, which is also quite meh.

It simply takes time to built up expertise, and you also need passionate people who actually want to push for quality. It seems to me that Thrustmaster and Logitech have too many bean counters in charge, and those people never have to passion to push for anything more than 'barely good enough'*.

* This is why a proven technique to innovate in large companies that sell lots of products that require little innovation, and where bean counters do good work for those product lines, is to create a start-up-like structure. Then the people who work there need to be the innovative types, and the bean counters and their rules have to be kept far away.

Edited March 18 by Aapje

[Dogmanbird]

has anyone seen any dimensions documented for this? 

 

[Aapje]

From how they presented it, this seems like an early prototype that may not be released on 2025. So even if you figure out the dimensions of this version, there is a good chance that it'll change before release.

[Hiob]

1 hour ago, Dogmanbird said:

has anyone seen any dimensions documented for this? 

 

Whoever is going to use this, needs VERY long arms (or short legs)......

[Dogmanbird]

I thought the same thing    Even though they’ve pushed the yoke back and the right rudder forward probably to make the photo look better

[Nightdare]

6 hours ago, Hiob said:

There are choices. Some are reasonable in size like the Moza or the Rhino. But none is suited for sitting on the desktop. 

An old Logitech G940 also isn't actually suited to be 'sitting' on a desktop either

Not unless you want to anchor it down with 4 big screws, that thing would go all over the place, or you'd be fighting the FFB AND trying to keep it in place with 1 hand

 

Edited March 18 by Nightdare

[ismaeljorda]

 

[Avenger31]

Any news/rumors when CT will be released?

[Aapje]

Not that I know.

[Avenger31]

I hope it will be soon, or I will go for Moza ab9