DIY yoke + paddles

[rvt]

Hey all,

 

just wanted to share my DIY yoke + paddles.

Main reason for building where:

• Fun
• Cheaper then buying a yoke + paddles.

 

I decided to make a all wood construction with 'stick style' mounting of the yoke. I was looking into designs of table top yokes, which was my preference but I couldn't find anything that I could make out of wood and would be fairly reliable without backslash or other oddities.

The yoke, peddles and stick all have 'auto center', this is done with some simples spring's and elastic bands. Currently problem with that is that it doesn't give me a strong 'feedback' yet, so I need to go ahead and let some springs make somewhere to give it a better feel. I will work on V2 and modify it once I have a bit of time again and have other items I want/need to modify. First I need to see if this will actually work, and feedback from the forum.

 

The electronics consists of a mbed micro controller of the type LPC1768 that features 12 bit A/D converters, so it's nice an accurate all the way, I got one of these micro controllers for free, just in case you are wondering why MBED and not Arduino or others. The MBED does have a API you can use for HID, so it was fairly easy to get that going and X-Plane will read the values straight away. The software is still work in progress, but it works. I do have some noice issues still, but that's not noticable during flying, but I need to 'easy' the controller down a bit because it's pushing the USB to hard at this moment. It already has a low-pass software filter and hardware filter but I need to play with the values a bit more.

One of the biggest problems I had was to find linear potentiometers here in Ecuador so at the moment the potentiometers are logarithmic and they are current configured in such a way that they give me the most linear response. I am going to order linear versions of of these days to solve that issue.

 

Current state is, IT WORKS! I can fly, take off and landing. As I am not a pilot i of course don't have any idea how good it is at the moment. It does feel rather sensitive to me, but I can imagine that any plane will be sensitive, e.g. if I move slightly to the left/right it will respond directly to that input.

 

Finally, some images:

 

 

[Fox3]

Nice work!

[Mr. Dare]

Very nice DIY! I always love to see other people's innovative home built projects, so inspiring!

[rvt]

Thanks guys!

 

I just published the software just in case somebody has a MBED device and want's to build something like this.

The repository can be found here : http://mbed.org/users/rvt/code/JoytStick/

 

At this moment not all features are implemented and I am still working on decoding the 5 buttons on the yoke itself and send that correctly over HID.

However, all filters are in place.

 

The sample frequency is set to 1Khz and it's passed through a digital low-pass filter before it's get send over HID. The system is also build in such a way that it won't 'push' each data and only send's data when data was actually changed and it's maximum frequency is currently set at 20hz HID updates.