Get online to
http://www.mcmastercarr.com- order a 6 inch piece of steel rod of 3/8" diameter
- order 2 steel ball bearings, with a 3/8" inner diameter, and a 7/8" outer diameter
- Order two locking collars with set screw, and 2 belleville washers with 3/8" Inner Diameter
- Go to Home Depot and buy 3 oak planks that measure 36" long by 3 or 4 inches wide, with a 3/4" thickness
- Buy a pack of wood screws about 2 inches long, and of about 3/16" shank diameter
- Buy two tension springs of about 2 inches long
- Buy one 100Kohm Potentiometer with linear taper from Radio Shack
Assemble said components so that you have a teter-bar style set of rudder peddles with the axis of rotation about 45 degrees towards the pilot.
Take your joystick apart, and attach about 4-5 feet of wire onto the pot wires, completely bypassing the pot in the joystick handle. For the Logitech Wingman Extreme 3d Digital yada yada, they just use Pots! No optical sensing at all. They just take the analog signal and convert it to digital, so as long as you have a high quality pot of about the same resistance, it works just fine to wire those in instead of their pots, BUT the center (place of roation where the pot has about 50Kohms of resistance going to the outer leads from the inner ones, has to be centered , or close to it in order for calibration to work properly. Drill a hole in the side of thte joystick plastic so that the wires can exit, and strain relieve the wires, leaving a loop that attaches to the base. The other end of the wires is attached to the pot on your set of rudder peddles. Run it through the calibration routine, and make sure that you have the polarity set up correctly.. (ie left rudder pressure gives a left indication on the program), and you should be golden. Also, in order to find the "center" for the pot, you must either use a volt meter and measure it directly, or try to find the center of rotation of the pot, and hope it's close enough. This is fairly difficult to do without a volt meter, and I ended up just using the volt meter to find the pot's "center" before mounting the pot on the peddle assembly.
I'm by no means a professional enginer or electronics expert, but by using a little common sense and basic machine design knowledge I ended up with a pair of stictionless and absolutely precise rudder peddles that are more durable than anything on the market, and should never wear out since the bearings are capable of withstanding loads of hundreds of pounds at thousands of RPM.
BTW. I made a whole joystick too, which is has no slop, no friction, and doesn't have spikes, and for the electronics I just used a wingman extreme 3d ditital. It's amazing what you can build if you use a few high quality components like the ball bearings and shafts from McMaster Carr..
Also, the whole rudder peddle assembly took about 8-10 hours to get working, starting with design, fabrication, electronics wiring and trouble shooting, and finally getting it to calibrate properly. This is pretty fast, but keep in mind, I had just build a joystick from scratch, so the rudder peddles were much simpler in comparison.
You could build a joystick this way using ANY joystick that uses analog pots. This would allow you to even make a complete HOTAS setup with the wingman extreme 3d, except you only have 8 buttons and an 8 way hat.
Other joysticks would yield more combinations..
Anyway.. forgive my terrible writing skills. I'm a pilot not a technical writer.
