Board index FlightGear Support Hardware

Trim Wheel - I made one

Joysticks, pedals, monitors.

Trim Wheel - I made one

Postby tom_nl » Mon Oct 26, 2020 7:40 pm

Hi All,

I've been putting together a custom panel for the last few months based around a Logitech yoke for flying the Cessna. What I decided it really needed next was trim controls for both elevator and rudder - trimming using the yoke buttons never felt right.

No-one seems to make them (at least at reasonable prices) and the Flight Velocity one is too wide for my panel, so I did what any self-respecting maker would do, and designed and built my own!

From the 3D model in Freecad:

Image

Image

To the actual printed part:

Image

Image

And integrated with the panel:

Image

It's designed to fit with the Logitech throttle quadrant. Unfortunately I mis-measured the quadrant and got the curvature slightly wrong, but i'm not printing it again as the body is four parts that are about ten hours printing in total! (not to mention quite a bit of filament).

Every part of the trim wheel (and a lot of the panel too) is 3D printed. Apart from that all that's needed is a couple of 10K potentiometers, assorted M3 and M6 bolts, an M8 bolt for the trim wheel axle and two 608ZZ bearings for it and the gear behind the wheel you can't see in the pictures. Plus some basic tools to finish it off - e.g. drills for opening up the holes, and some taps for threading the holes for the bolts. It was entirely built using things I had lying around in the garage already as I didn't want to buy anything (hence the M6 bolts holding it together which are overkill - M4 would have been better but I didn't have any).

All the switches. displays, rotary encoders etc run off an Arduino Mega 2560 that's controlled by about 1300 lines of code, with communication to/from FlightGear using the generic protocol across serial. The instruments on the LCD panel are driven by raspberry pi zero running FGPanel communicating via USB gadget ethernet. FG itself is running on a mid-2014 MacBook Pro driving three external screens, which although old is perfectly up to the job (the discrete graphics are certainly needed here).

Overall i'm rather pleased with it - it makes a huge difference to the flying experience - trimming is much more natural (more like I remember when I used to fly for real) and I seem to be able to trim the aircraft much better now - so much so that it's easy to get it stable 'hands off'.

If there's sufficient interest, i'm considering uploading the STL files to Thingiverse or similar - my way of giving back to the community.

Tom
tom_nl
 
Posts: 84
Joined: Tue Aug 04, 2020 11:41 am
Location: Netherlands
OS: OS X Big Sur

Re: Trim Wheel - I made one

Postby stuart » Mon Oct 26, 2020 8:22 pm

Hi Tom,

That's a really neat home cockpit setup. A great example of what you can do with a little ingenuity and the flexibility of FlightGear.

I agree that having a proper trim control is a big improvement to the simulation experience.

-Stuart
G-MWLX
User avatar
stuart
Moderator
 
Posts: 1629
Joined: Wed Nov 29, 2006 10:56 am
Location: Edinburgh
Callsign: G-MWLX

Re: Trim Wheel - I made one

Postby Johan G » Mon Oct 26, 2020 10:21 pm

stuart wrote in Mon Oct 26, 2020 8:22 pm:That's a really neat home cockpit setup.

Ditto! :D
Low-level flying — It's all fun and games till someone looses an engine. (Paraphrased from a YouTube video)
Improving the Dassault Mirage F1 (Wiki, Forum, GitLab. Work in slow progress)
Some YouTube videos
Johan G
Moderator
 
Posts: 6629
Joined: Fri Aug 06, 2010 6:33 pm
Location: Sweden
Callsign: SE-JG
IRC name: Johan_G
Version: 2020.3.4
OS: Windows 10, 64 bit

Re: Trim Wheel - I made one

Postby tom_nl » Wed Oct 28, 2020 11:59 am

Thanks :D I have to admit i'm rather pleased with how it's turning out so far. Been a nice project to work on as i've had to use all my skills in woodworking, electronics, programming, CAD etc to get it to come together.

You might notice there's a lot of free space on the panel at present. The next additions will be pull switches for carb heat, parking brake, primer etc, and a rotary switch for the ignition. That's going to happen once I get round to trawling AliExpress for suitable components and then CAD up the modules.

There's also a nice large space under the right hand LCD where a push button panel would fit nicely for things like autopilot control.... Not that I use autopilot at the moment - most of my flying at present is circuit bashing to learn how to fly properly again (after all, it has been over 25 years since I stopped....).

Tom
Last edited by Johan G on Wed Oct 28, 2020 11:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Please do not quite the entire preceding post.
tom_nl
 
Posts: 84
Joined: Tue Aug 04, 2020 11:41 am
Location: Netherlands
OS: OS X Big Sur

Re: Trim Wheel - I made one

Postby Johan G » Wed Oct 28, 2020 11:30 pm

tom_nl wrote in Wed Oct 28, 2020 11:59 am:[...] most of my flying at present is circuit bashing to learn how to fly properly again [...]

The good old traffic pattern is quite an effective way to hammer in the basics. :wink: :D (It is a bit of a grind though...)
Low-level flying — It's all fun and games till someone looses an engine. (Paraphrased from a YouTube video)
Improving the Dassault Mirage F1 (Wiki, Forum, GitLab. Work in slow progress)
Some YouTube videos
Johan G
Moderator
 
Posts: 6629
Joined: Fri Aug 06, 2010 6:33 pm
Location: Sweden
Callsign: SE-JG
IRC name: Johan_G
Version: 2020.3.4
OS: Windows 10, 64 bit

Re: Trim Wheel - I made one

Postby khcarrmo » Thu Dec 03, 2020 12:09 am

Great design - am very interested in you're willing to share the .stl files. I have an Ender-3 and have been 3D printing for a year. This would really be an assist to my FlightGear setup - I have the same yoke and quandrant you have. Any of the other stuff also -- but the trim wheel in particular. Thank you!
khcarrmo
 
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Dec 02, 2020 11:58 pm

Re: Trim Wheel - I made one

Postby tom_nl » Thu Dec 03, 2020 10:41 am

HI khcarro - leave it with me, i'll see if I can work out how Thingiverse works and upload it.

Before I do that, I need to make some modifications:
  • the rudder trim lever needs to be a little longer - rudder trimming is a bit too sensitive at the moment
  • The body assembly is designed as four parts because I was having some layer shifting problems at the time which i've now rectified. This can be reduced to two parts.
  • For the fasteners, For screwing the body together I designed it to use what I had available which were M6 bolts. M4 countersunk screws will be better

Hence when it's there you might want to do some remixing of the design.

Tom
tom_nl
 
Posts: 84
Joined: Tue Aug 04, 2020 11:41 am
Location: Netherlands
OS: OS X Big Sur

Re: Trim Wheel - I made one

Postby tom_nl » Sat Dec 05, 2020 10:14 pm

Working on modifying the design to account for the above, and will try to add mounts to mount an Arduino pro micro internally (if there’s space) so you can connect it by USB.

Almost there - Give me a few more days and I’ll be ready to share it.

Tom
tom_nl
 
Posts: 84
Joined: Tue Aug 04, 2020 11:41 am
Location: Netherlands
OS: OS X Big Sur

Re: Trim Wheel - I made one

Postby tom_nl » Sun Dec 06, 2020 5:45 pm

The design has been published to Thingiverse, however because i'm a new user you'll have to wait 24 hours until it's available.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4676615

Tom
tom_nl
 
Posts: 84
Joined: Tue Aug 04, 2020 11:41 am
Location: Netherlands
OS: OS X Big Sur


Return to Hardware

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 7 guests