Community Event / Creation DIY Controller and Throttle

t00thPIK

t00thPIK
Awesome, Cat, they look great!
As for your custom seat, consider getting a good quality general duty car seat. You'll probably find it more comfortable over those long space faring sessions than a sports or racing seat. Just a thought :)

Edit: What are the dimensions of those project boxes?
 
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Xsannz

Xsannz
Wicked sick dude.

any thought on a palm rest at the bottom of each control stick?
 
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Schmack

Schmack
Some of you guys are something else. These designs are top notch. Now I can show my wife "SEE! I'm not THAT hard core.. look at these guys!"
 

Cataclysm72

Cataclysm72
t00thPIK said:
Awesome, Cat, they look great!
As for your custom seat, consider getting a good quality general duty car seat. You'll probably find it more comfortable over those long space faring sessions than a sports or racing seat. Just a thought :)

Edit: What are the dimensions of those project boxes?
Click to expand...
I thought the CAD drawing above was readable, but it isn’t. So here it is: 140mm x 190mm x 54mm.
Xsannz said:
Wicked sick dude.

any thought on a palm rest at the bottom of each control stick?
Click to expand...
There’s a lovely leather covered palm rest on the housing. The sticks themselves don’t have any - I choose so for sake of simplicity. I do very much like the thought but I haven’t been able to come up with a good solution that is both easy to make and feels comfortable. I already spent 1KG of 3d printing filament just for the parts of this first version.
 

Cataclysm72

Cataclysm72
PCB’s ordered! These boards can be used for any joystick, not just mine. By connecting two boards together (only one has a CPU acting as a ‘master’) this will allow 26 buttons and 4 axes per board. With the exposed I2C bus you could go up to 8 boards driven by a single USB device (max. analog 8 axes but up to a massive 204 switches). The lighting system is not on the board. I decided to leave that up to any implementer. Personally i’m using the excellent Adafruit HT16K33 led driver backpack which has everything I need right there on the board. It is good for 128 multiplexer leds (per board) so there’s no need to spend more money on custom prints.

These custom PCBs should arrive in about 3 weeks. Until then I will have to make do with a protoboard.

MqPygBXl.png

ffdDk4jl.png
 

t00thPIK

t00thPIK
This is amazing. I'm just blown away. Brilliant work, Cat. This could make custom joystick building easier for anyone interested in such things. Can anyone now buy one of these PCBs from you? Or order them from where you got them made?
The closest thing I've seen to this is the Leo Bodnar BU0836 series of direct connect joystick controllers (http://www.leobodnar.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=204), but this looks even better. What are the dimensions of this PCB?
 

Cataclysm72

Cataclysm72
t00thPIK said:
This is amazing. I'm just blown away. Brilliant work, Cat. This could make custom joystick building easier for anyone interested in such things. Can anyone now buy one of these PCBs from you? Or order them from where you got them made?
The closest thing I've seen to this is the Leo Bodnar BU0836 series of direct connect joystick controllers (http://www.leobodnar.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=204), but this looks even better. What are the dimensions of this PCB?
Click to expand...
That Leo Bodnar print is pretty amazing. How he managed to get everything in a single chip amazes me at a very small form factor.

My PCB is based on the components I had available like the Arduino and the led driver. But given time and money i would have skipped the through-hole components and put everything (including the led driver) together on a single surface-mount pcb for cheap fabrication and dead-easy installation. But this is the first prototype. Already I have found a big flaw in the board, the i2c dip switch is pretty much useless because it lacks pullup-resistors. Very cool to find out just 1 hour after it went into production :( Ah well there’s a saying “if it goes right the first time, it wasn’t very difficult.”

The PCB is 88.9mm x 39.3mm (3.5” x 1.55” if you are using imperial)
 

Cataclysm72

Cataclysm72
And so we arrive at the end of yet another day of tinkering. Working on the electronic bits here and there. I managed to connect and test all the analog axes. They work great but my change to turn the Z-axis into a proper ‘Throttle’ HID report resulted in Elite Dangerous no longer recognising the axis. So that was a total waste of time. Nevertheless I also worked on some lighting effects and they look pretty ok. Not as bright as I would’ve liked but legible nonetheless.

So the status now is a working throttle block with a few lights, and a partially working X/Y stage with just the trigger, no light, and a buckload of wires sticking out with a possible chance of shorting something out. That will be my first priority.

All the hardware works. All communication between throttle and yoke works, the lights work, the data gets through. It is now a question of expanding on the same concept (connect a light, connect a button).

Firmware is also coming along nicely. With this amount of leds and wires it is becoming impossible to keep the firmware generic, especially with all the animation stages going on. I did keep the source nice and clean though by using a few object classes here and there so people checking out the code later on should be able to understand it. One example is a Calibration class which takes care of doing all the math work to take the potmeter value and turn it into an self-calibrating value between -32000 and 32000 (which is what the joystick reports to the computer). So what does the calibration do? Well basically after plugging in the device is filters out the noise, calculates the minimum and maximum values and transforms that into a proper scale with a few end-stop deadzones. The deadzones will make sure that the maximum or minimum value can be reached in top or bottom 5% of the stick. The reason for this work is to avoid having to implement a custom calibration tool.

Tomorrow I hope to move from the breadboard to a solderboard so I can get rid of all the jumper cables and have some solid reliable connections. All these wires is making the readings a bit noisy.

Zvtwvr7l.jpg
 

Neokortex

Neokortex
Looks like you have a lot of fun and reminds me so much of the good old commodore days, when anybody was building something and having fun on new things ;)

You should continue after ED and make a robot (maybe drone) that you can control with it. Its much better than just for frameshi... drives all the time.

Have fun ;)
 
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Cataclysm72

Cataclysm72
No picture this time. I want to save them for when i'm done.

Today I finished the soldering of the prototype board and I am very much a happy camper now. Dropping the breadboard and switching to properly soldered wires made the whole contraption much more stable. The potentiometers have almost no jitter anymore even though there's 2 meter of cable between the two modules. The data is looks pretty solid. The potentiometers I am using right now were taken from a scrapheap, but after I sprayed some 'Kontakt' contact spray into the potmeters they runs absolutely smooth and jitter-free.

I have a few more solder joints to do to finish up the lighting scheme for the throttle housing, and then I have a few lights left on the yoke (X/Y stage). This second module doesn't have the throttle lighting bar so it hasn't got as much leds as the other one.

All this means that i am close to finishing the project. I need to figure out a way to mount the modules to my desk or my chair. The modules aren't heavy enough to sit solid on the desk. Some mounting fixture is needed and i'm not ready to drill holes in the desk just yet.
 

Cataclysm72

Cataclysm72
Thanks Jacob and Philip (and Mod)!

I'm very pleased with getting this far in such a short period., and that for a first version as well! I was able to do a short mission in the game with the new build which was particularly awesome as the controller jitter has gone since the last trials :D :D :D

I will probably add some more lights (just for effect), change the metal screws to black countersunk ones for an awesome finish, and find a way to mount these things on a playseat. The units look huge, but they are actually smaller (and lower) than my old blue Saitek X45:

TTy4f8Mm.png
 

Cataclysm72

Cataclysm72
Ving said:
That's completely awesome, congrats :cool:

When do you start taking orders? :D
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That is a great compliment, thanks. That kind of depends on what you will be paying me :D:D. I haven't given any thought to selling this, though i might sell of the remaining printboards when i'm confident they are good enough.

UPDATE:
I'm ready. All the lights are in and happily blinking, asking, nay begging to be played. But that will have to wait until tomorrow. I've seen a little too much wires today :D I'll put on some more pics of the finished build tomorrow when the light is better. Hurrah!
 
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Cataclysm72

Cataclysm72
I've done quite a few missions past few days. It plays great but i need to fix a few bugs quickly. Sometimes it just crashes, and one mouse axis is dodgy. Nothing too serious... Hey i'm playing on my own hardware. I built it, surely i can fix it!
 
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