My fellow TESTies, I'm excited to say that I'm finally starting fabrication on my custom dual sticks! When I'm done, I'm aiming for an ugly frankenstick, with some rusty old steel tubing forming the base, two halves of an xbox controller as the grips, and(eventually) a trackball mouse where the right thumbstick used to be. I'm hoping for the best of all worlds; comfort, familiarity, plenty of axis/buttons, and absolute aiming for gimbaled weapons. I don't really like the idea of twisty sticks, so I'm not going to bother with that. Those of you keeping track at home should have counted 10 total degrees of freedom; more DOF, more better. I will be adding more buttons, but I'm holding off on that until I actually know where buttons will be comfortable to reach.
I spent some time after work yesterday at the college machine shop, and I picked out some nice scrap pieces. After a some time finalizing my plans with the scraps I found and starting on the machining, I've got something I can show off!(sorry for the image quality)
The big chunk of steel is the housing and base, the smaller chunk of steel is the center part of the gimbal, the little pieces of aluminum are going to be mounts for the bearing. Below are some CAD renderings of the gimbal, the first with a transparent housing, the second I removed the housing and made the center of the gimbal transparent. I'm using 5/16 socket head cap screws instead of 8mm shaft because the bolts are much more free and are practically the same size.
On the electronics side of things, I'm going to be using an Arduino with MMJoy to interface with windows, and another little Arduino to translate the combined motions of both sticks into pitch/yaw/roll/heave like this:
In my head, those motions feel very intuitive and immersive. I can tie sway to the analog thumbstick, and although I don't really think I'll need analog control over throttle, I can tie it to the other axis of the analog thumbstick as well for 6DOF analog control over the ship(yay!). The triggers on the xbox controller both have analog pots, so that will give me fancy dynamic zoom, and maybe a tiered trigger with energy weapons firing when the trigger is half pulled, and ballistic weapons firing when it is fully pulled.
I'll post a full BOM once I know everything's going to work together.
Many thanks to:
052 of TEST for https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/192975/my-guide-to-building-a-custom-6-axis-stick-using-the-arduino-pro-micro#latest, Okona on the RSI forums for ideas, and mega_mozg_13 for http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3899105/all/MMJoy_-_Build_your_own_USB_con
I spent some time after work yesterday at the college machine shop, and I picked out some nice scrap pieces. After a some time finalizing my plans with the scraps I found and starting on the machining, I've got something I can show off!(sorry for the image quality)
The big chunk of steel is the housing and base, the smaller chunk of steel is the center part of the gimbal, the little pieces of aluminum are going to be mounts for the bearing. Below are some CAD renderings of the gimbal, the first with a transparent housing, the second I removed the housing and made the center of the gimbal transparent. I'm using 5/16 socket head cap screws instead of 8mm shaft because the bolts are much more free and are practically the same size.
On the electronics side of things, I'm going to be using an Arduino with MMJoy to interface with windows, and another little Arduino to translate the combined motions of both sticks into pitch/yaw/roll/heave like this:
In my head, those motions feel very intuitive and immersive. I can tie sway to the analog thumbstick, and although I don't really think I'll need analog control over throttle, I can tie it to the other axis of the analog thumbstick as well for 6DOF analog control over the ship(yay!). The triggers on the xbox controller both have analog pots, so that will give me fancy dynamic zoom, and maybe a tiered trigger with energy weapons firing when the trigger is half pulled, and ballistic weapons firing when it is fully pulled.
I'll post a full BOM once I know everything's going to work together.
Many thanks to:
052 of TEST for https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/192975/my-guide-to-building-a-custom-6-axis-stick-using-the-arduino-pro-micro#latest, Okona on the RSI forums for ideas, and mega_mozg_13 for http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3899105/all/MMJoy_-_Build_your_own_USB_con
