No pictures yet, this is still in the planning stages, but as I'm going through this from the ground up and learning about cockpit and panel building I thought I might share the experience from the early stages as I learn and it might help others learn. Note that my electronics skills are limited; I took a circuits class in college taught by a professor who decided we needed to learn for ourselves with very little instruction from him using a textbook that was famous for "and based on theorem x.y.z" without telling you WHY that theorem applied or often even HOW, so while I understand what a resistor is and for that's about as far as my wiring goes. Fortunately it looks like Leo Bodnar has taken the guesswork out of much of this, as his controller board (
http://www.leobodnar.com/products/BU0836X/) just needs buttons and axes wired right into it without diodes or resistors or any of that other fancy stuff, so I should be golden.
I am redoing my den which is giving me the opportunity to improve my Aces High controller setup. I currently have CH Pro Pedals, Pro Throttle, Fighterstick, and an MFP, but I can't figure out how to mount the MFP, so it's kind of sitting next to the monitor flat and not easy to see. What I am planning to do is a built-in corner desk wrapping around a good half of the room, ending up with enough space for 2 parents and 2 kids each with their own machines. Depth of the desk is to be determined, and will be somewhere around 24" (typical writing desk) with right-angles in the corners down to 18" (the current depth from the back of my monitor to the front of my keyboard) with beveled corners where I cut the corner at 45 degrees so you have a flat desk when facing the corner and sides angling away from you to parallel the walls. Not sure my flight console idea fits with the beveled corner idea as the consoles my end up partially under the desk and be hard to reach. Height will be 24", which is the height of a typical keyboard tray. I intend to mount our LCD monitors to the wall with adjustable mounting arms, and then likely run kitchen cabinets around the top for storage.
Given that setup, my plan for flight controllers is similar to what lots of folks have posted with pits. I won't really have a front panel, that is likely to interfere with my non-flightsimming work and other games, but I can build a pair of side consoles. These will have a main run at the height of my chair, then an angled back to reach up to about meet the desk. I'll build spaces in them to place the throttle and stick, both now at chair height where the F-16 intended them to be. Most importantly I'll be able to add some additional controls to one or both.
As for controls, what I am specifically hoping to accomplish there is twofold. First, I want more buttons to replace my use of the keyboard, relegating the keyboard to chat usage primarily. I'm over 40 now, I can't remember all these key combos, so what I want is critical flight/combat functions on the stick and throttle, and occasional-use controls on the consoles. Things like guns, flaps, and views need to be on the stick and throttle (views at least until I can get a TrackIR), but other bits like engine start, gear, tailhook, switching formation planes, etc can all be on the console, and labelled as such. I already have much of this set up with the MFP, but again not sure how to conveniently mount this to make it easy to reach and use. If the thing had a VESA monitor mount, maybe I wouldn't be going as far as I am, and I may in fact still figure out how to mount it for certain controls, but I also have my second goal that it does not fit.
The second goal is trim wheels. Right now I'm using one of the 4-way hats on the FighterStick for elevator and rudder trim, and that just doesn't quite have the fidelity or speed of use I'm looking for. There is one dial on the FighterStick (the throttle wheel) I could use, but it's not convenient to reach when I'm actually trying to maneuver. So I want to build in a set of three trim wheels, one for each of the main control surfaces, on the left-hand console where the throttle will sit. This is probably the biggest single driving factor in doing these consoles.
One optional bit I may or may not do, or maybe save for after the basics are all working, is gut the throttle and stick, build the hardware in to the consoles, and replace the circuit boards with another pair of Leo Bodnar boards. The main reason for doing that would be to upgrade to 12-bit precision on the axes, but I might also play around with setting up engine start/stop/WEP switches like nrshida did with his custom throttle (
http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,297108.0.html). However, I may not want to mess with the durability of the CH controller setup, so I keep waffling on this. I'll deal with it later.
As for specifics, I've ordered the Leo Bodnar board, and I also ordered some buttons to play with. Going to try these:
http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail&name=EG2551-ND. Not sure yet if they'll work, as my limited electronics knowledge means I don't actually KNOW how to hook them up yet. I am pretty positive that the PC termination means I can plug them into a breadboard, which is great for prototyping but I may not have room between the breadboard and the panel surface to actually run the wires. I'm going to look into buying some PC boards at Radio Shack to see how they work in those. My working theory based on limited searching is that the buttons will plug into the PC board, and then I can solder on the wires on the back, allowing me to mount the buttons on one side pushing up through the panel surface, and have all the wiring on the back/bottom of the PC board. I'm not quite sure that's how it all works, so the next little bit will be spent buying some different materials and trying some different mounting schemes. These buttons have a 7.5mm height for their case (the push surface sticks up a bit over that), so about .28", so I can't have a particularly thick panel surface. If I CAN mount them to the top of the PC board and solder the back, then I can try and find some good stiff 1/4" plywood or something similar to make the panel surface out of. If I CAN'T mount them that way, then I'll have to talk to someone I know with a CNC machine and see about maybe getting a panel done in thin sheet metal or aluminum that I can then mount the board to with spacers, and/or look at different switches that panel mount and have solder lugs where I can solder the wires directly to them and not worry about a board at all.
I also need to figure out the actual "wheel" part of "trim wheel". I know I need a 10k or 100k linear (as opposed to the audio ones that are logarithmic, so be careful there!) potentiometer to plug into the controller board, but what wheel to put on top? I pulled apart an old CD radio we had and stole the volume and tuning knobs from it that look like they might work (similar to the throttle wheel on the FighterStick), but I'm one short AND I need to figure out how to actually attach them to the pots. Also need a good source for potentiometers; Radio Shack has some for like $3, but I don't know how good they are, and other pots with similar specs seem to be $20+ at places like DigiKey, so I'll probably try the Radio Shack ones and then upgrade if I need to.
So I'll be spending some time checking out these buttons and various mounting options to see if they work, and checking out other buttons and mounting options if they don't.
More posts as I make progress and figure some of these details out, along with pictures as I have some. I do welcome advice on any of this, and hope others who have been thinking about this may learn something as well.
