Quote:
Originally Posted by MaxGunz
60 degrees turn? You can get better ones.
What matters is how many ohms range you get from stop to stop and how many ohms your hardware uses. Ohms is resistance. I would start with the pot you currently use and put a meter across one of the outside legs of the pot to the center leg to find out what you got.
The standard plug into the gameport stick runs from 0 to 100k ohms. 1/100th of a turn covers 1k ohms. If I put that in series with a 10k pot then that pot will be 1/10th as sensitive as the 100k. The digitizer measures how much voltage gets through with 0 ohms meaning full and increasing ohms going towards none, 110k total as opposed to 100k is not a big deal and should only affect calibration.
That's why I tell that you can have one pot/slider for coarse adjustment and the other for fine adjustment. If you want 20x fine then for a 100k coarse you would add a 5k fine that would change the total resistance 1/20th as much for the same turn as the coarse knob.
Maybe the better setup would be a coarse long slider and turn pot for fine adjustment.
What your stick uses for values, you will have to find out for yourself. If you're up for it there are hobby controller electronics in the $60 and under range like the BUO-series at leobodnar.com (has 12-bit A/D) and less-accurate (10-bit) but far cheaper DIY MCU's like the Teensy's and Leonardo's (that can use external ADC chips to get more bits resolution but that's 'cheating', hehe) and make your own stick which is not for the faint of heart or mind.
The hard part could be making acceptable knobs, grips, and bases, ie the mechanical bits. Plaster molds and bondo then hours of sanding, filling, etc?
I can code the latter and breadboard them but have no shop space and am lousy at soldering and fine work due to shaky hands. The newer controllers and software (since 200  make it easier than ever but I say that already knowing C since the 80's. Your mileage may vary, learning to code from zip may not be worth what you get. There's a lot of help available from Leo for his products (already coded) and on the Arduino forum for those.
In the last two years I have recovered/relearned a lot of my old "skillz" playing with Arduino. I have even made leds that self-adjust with changes to ambient light (LOL Fehler, how much resistor? MINE changes itself!). |
I'm fairly aware of ohms and resistance; they covered it pretty thoroughly while I was attending the USN's Electronics Technician 'A' School at Great Lakes over the winter of '75-'76 (August to April, which was the full Magilla back then), and I have applied that knowledge & training fairly regularly as a field & test engineer over the last 30+ years.
The pots that CH used for my old yoke are all 270 ohms, but they use only the 'middle range' of the pots because that is where the change in resistance is most consistent; the resistance between the 10th and 11th degrees is almost exactly the same as the resistance between degrees 45 and 46. This allows them to use less expensive pots and still give you pretty good precision across the range of movement that their mechanical setup allows.
Since little Joey only cracked the plastic case and one of the Yoke handles (it was only a drop of about six feet!), I was able to recover the CH control circuit card as well as the five axes and the 12 buttons plus POV hat; this means that when I plug the USB into my computer it sees a CH Yoke and automatically puts me into the CH Control Manager software, which allows me to combine it with my other CH controllers into one or two (rather than four or five) controllers for Il-2, which I'd rather not lose.
I was able to cut out the throttle/prop pitch/mixture levers' mounts so those three axes are intact, while the X-Y axes are now mounted in the box as twist knobs, with that short range of movement I was complaining about; I'm wondering if rather than putting another potentiometer in series, it might be better to put one in parallel to get that fine control. I'm also still looking at those gear kits that Tamiya makes for robots and RF controlled vehicles with an eye to adapting one of those to my needs with something along the lines of 20:1 ratios.
I'm not very familiar with programming (one course in Basic back in college 25 years ago), so tossing the little CH CCA is something I hesitate to do.
cheers
horseback