For those who have asked, here are some pictures of the homemade throttle I use to play Aces High.
Hopefully it will at least inspire someone who is thinking of making a similar controller themselves. Especially those on a small budget, as I was when I made it. I am not a nerd and not an electronics expert either. I just wanted a decent throttle that would last a long time. I had more time than money when I made it, so it is made mostly from recycled scrap parts with only a few hand tools.
The black body, centre pivot and aluminium cover are from a broken hard drive. The cover reminded me a little bit of a P-38 throttle quadrant I'd seen in a picture and that's what gave me the idea. The main pivot is ballraced so there is no stiction at all and the movement of the lever is very precise (and silent). The white arch part serves as a spacer and also connection to the base plate and is built up from sheets of plastic card. The green cover is scratchbuilt from Tamiya kit parts (good plastic you see).
Disclaimer, some of the below is slightly technical and very boring if you're not interested in such things.
It uses a Leo Bodnar 12-bit controller (
http://www.leobodnar.com/products/BU0836A/). This just gives you more precision, same as with many digital cameras nowadays. Without wanting to bore anyone to death, most commercial controllers are currently 8 bit, which looks like this: 11111111 which is binary for 255, thus you can store any number between o and 255, hence 256 steps. One third throttle would be for 01010101 for example (decimal 85).
With a 12 bit controller you have 12 bits, so there is more space available: 00001111 11111111 or binary 4095, thus a much higher resolution. AH interprets the throttle position between two fixed values, but you can make a much finer adjustments between these two points. Also future-proofs the unit somewhat I hope.
Mr Bodnar suggested that having the potentiometer rotating as much as possible gave more precision. Given I only wanted the lever to move about one third of a circle, I decided to use a gear system to step up the movement of the pot.
I bought some Lego gears off eBay and carefully carved the centre out of the black one, fitting this to the moving hub. This was the part that supported the actual disks when it was a hard drive. The smaller grey gear drives the pot. The interference was critical because I didn't want backlash and also not too tight for longevity.
I was a little more lucky than skillful here because when I tested it I had 4093 of the possible 4096 steps. Had the pot rolled more than 360 degrees the value would drop back to zero so I'd drop back down to zero power at full throttle. The lever moves 140 degrees and the pot almost a full circle.
I tried to design it so I didn't have to take my hand off the throttle to push a separate WEP switch, thus when the throttle is at the fully open stop, I can actually click the lever a tiny bit further to operate a microswitch. Since I'd done that at the front stop I did the same at the rear stop and that is the engine start / stop switch.
When the knob is totally vertical, that is exactly 50% power. So I can feel the power setting and operate all the relevant switches without looking or taking my hand off it.
The tools used for this project were: one borrowed hacksaw, a few hand files, one pin-vice with a set of five small drills, some emery paper, a Swann Morten knife with several packets of blades and two 3mm taps and wrench. No power tools were used at all.
The lever was cut and filed from a piece of T6 plate I had salvaged from somewhere and the knob is not a full sized number 13 poolball, but a key ring that someone gave me. Number 13 is my racing number, well, my birthday actually. It had the perfect size & slippery texture.
It is fully functional and has been in use for a year now so far. Not cosmetically finished yet, I want to add two simple sliders into the slots of the green cover. One for RPM and the other for a spare. Once it's finished I will paint it.
The only functional addition will be a counterbalance so the lever can be left in any position. I have a lump of Bismuth which I will cast into the appropriate shape. I will probably do that on the beach when it is quiet because Mrs Shida frowns upon molten metal in the kitchen.
Was it worth it? Well I did learn a lot about projects, fabrication and especially determination. The throttle is very nice to use and has required no maintenance, save for one of the rocker arms breaking. I since replaced it with a thicker one. The potentiometer is rated for 5,000,000 rotations and I have a few spares. I never have to recalibrate it.
Was a lot of hard work, about four times more than I first imagined. I did enjoy making it though. Lots of tiny problems to solve & plenty of lateral thinking required.
Anyway, hope it is interesting to someone at least!
