Shadrach

I can't do stuff that neat even with a full set of hands, a workmate and an almost full set of teeth. My sawing drifts off line and my drilling skids all over the place. I can find putting my ideas into practice very frustrating. Not only have you got the skill but you must also have an incredible amount of patience.

Not as mean and business like as my wife would look if she caught me painting plastic pipes grey on the sitting room carpet. I'm looking forward to the next installment and all the twiddly bits fixed to it.

I got that too. It actually gave me a good boost in fps. I bench mark by loading the bomber intercept over London track and fly it on auto pilot. I was getting fps in high 30s except when attacking a bomber, especially first one, when it drops to mid - low teens with a bit of a stutter. Now I get high 50s although still a drop to high teens on first attack. AA seems better too. I use those files dropped into root directory to improve AA but now when I turn them on and off I can hardly tell the difference.

Amazing how someone I never met could give me so much enjoyment. Thanks Jim.

I read those to the wife.... thats when the fight started.

Greatly impressed.

Actually, my wife is one reason I build my own. Brand new toys sitting on the table are easily translatable into new shoes or a handbag whereas a few insignificant looking componants arriviing in jiffy bags to make what looks suspiciously like junk tends to slip under the radar.

Thanks for that, Brando, is there nothing you can't find on the internet? Those pots look identical to those in the Wingman. I'll check the Vishay pots again and compare. I have some hall sensors too but as the Vishay pots are already in place I'll hope they'll work.

It's always interesting seeing other folks take on DIY joysticks, especially how they think up ways of using odd bits to make something unique and personal. I enjoy this side of the game almost as much as flying. It's looking good Brando.

Don't touch the sheep - it's chewy.

As Brando said, you only need diodes if you are likely to have several switches permanently on. Say if you used a double pole switch where both up and down were on for your undercarriage so you could look at the switch and know where your gear was. Or maybe for stuff like lights etc. If you have more than a few switched on then I think you get ghost buttons appearing or something. But if all your switches are momentary then no need for diodes. After doing all my soldering I discovered the best wire to use for this sort of thing where little or no movement is going to happen is stuff with a single core rather than wire with strands. Oh well.

The pots are definately the weak point of the Wingman, pathetic little things held by plastic clips. I found more wear developed in the clips than movement in the pots which made the stick useless. The original pots are still attatched to the board so it should be a simple matter to disconnect them and attach them to the Vishay pots I have fitted to the mod. The only worry would be if the resistance of the Vishay pots were much lower than the Logitech ones and caused the board to burn out. I have tried using a multimeter on them but the Logitech pots are so worn and spikey I can't get a reliable reading. All the motors and switches are still connected correctly. The Logitech motors are suprisingly powerfull considering their size and toylike appearance. Up there with the Sidewinder I would say and the Sidewinders motors are massive in comparison. Maybe size really isn't everything. The main thing the Logitech stick has over the Sidewinder is the software. Fully adjustable with sliders compared with the Microsoft 'take what you're given' offering. The runners I used were metal rails with small nylon wheels. A lot of the problem was with the springs I was using for centering. I quite like the idea of having swinging pedals. I thought ball bearing fire door hinges would be a good way to hang them. I can also get stiff slotted plastic tubes from work that contained foil printing plates. They have the makings of a good torsion bar for centering.

Thanks for that C_G. Much appreciated. I had the joystick mounted on a box with the drawer runner pedals each side and a metal framed, plastic chair from the dump to sit on. As I said, it worked quite well apart from lack of FFB and the notchy action on the pedals. In fact I was using it when I first joined the Dogz and even made a rare successful carrier landing that first session. I also lost the connection to one of the pots so thought I would sort it all out and got a Sidewinder FFB2 to use whilst I was working on it. Because it took up a bit too much room it ended up going out in my workshop / outhouse and of course events and procrastination overtook it and it gradually disappeared under other bits that joined it and ended up gathering dust and cobwebs. The advent of CloD and it's need for more buttons and sliders fired up my enthusiasm again and the first thing I want to do is build a button box / control panel with trim wheels and a throttle control etc. I have all the bits I need and the idea is to mount it on my Saitek quadrant so I will have those control levers incorporated as well. Sadly, as life would have it, I find myself a bit swamped with other stuff at the moment. I am doing a big reorganization on the house plus I have an old shed in the corner of the garden which was collapsing under brambles and a Russian Vine and the neighbour was getting a bit shitty because it was threatening his fence and green house, which was fair enough, so I've cleared all that away and any bits I salvaged from it are now in the outhouse to be sorted so thats all cluttered again. Plus the wife isn't too well at the moment. She tends to suffer from depression alot, issues from her past and marriage to me I expect but shes going through a spell so all in all I am just getting to look in the forums and occasionally fire up CloD and fly a mission on auto pilot. All very sad.

Ok - as you've shown me yours, I'll show you mine, even though it stalled over a year ago but hope to get it going again and, for that matter, get back online with you guys soon. The withdrawal symptoms are hell. Basically I used a Logitech wingman including the FFB motors and extended the shaft. I used decent pots to a Bodnar board and I think you can see I geared up the pot rotation to get a full turn. It worked pretty well except for the FFB hence the odd springs to give me some centering. A bit of subsequent digging has made me suspect the pots need to connect to the logitech board for FFB to work as they need to be part of a loop. I also made some pedals which were operated using drawer runners but the runners were very noisy and notchy so I intent to use pedals hung from above like a P47 etc. As you see from the mechanism I geared up the pot on that as well. Have also included a piccie of my Bodnar Board switch matrix using the probably unnecessary diodes. What a mess - hope it works after all the fiddly soldering. Would just buy the new version now that dosn't need diodes.

If the shaft is worn evenly then the packing ideas would probably work ok, but I was thinking that a halfway house between a tube and fitting packing pieces to the face would be to fix a length of angle aluminium to two faces of the shaft. If you subtract the amount of play on each face used from the thickness of the aluminium then that is how much you would need to remove from two faces of the shaft. I suppose you could then take the shaft to a machine shop and have them mill it off but that would probably be quite expensive and rather defeat the object of the project. If you have a plunge woodworking router and some knowledge of making jigs and things I would have thought it would be easy enough to do a good job yourself. And if you used two lengths of angle aluminium you would, in effect, have a square tube any size you wanted. If you used self tappers and the heads stick up then you could utilize the existing slot in the round piece. You would need to cut another slot opposit for the other screws if using two lengths. Plus you would need to take material from all four faces or twice as much from two. It is quite an interesting project - good luck whatever you decide to do with it. Thinking about it - one way of removing material from the faces of the shaft would be to clamp two metal straight edges each side of the shaft so the amount to be removed stands proud and then shave off the plastic using a sharp blade, something like a spoke shave would probably work well. The tricky bit would be setting up the straight edges so they were perfectly true and accurate.