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:
To the actual printed part:
And integrated with the panel:
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