Flutterby™! : Flying plywood

I mentioned wanting some helicopter simulator flight controls. I went out and bought a cheapie joystick with a twist rudder, tried to fly the default helicopters in FlightGear, and quickly realized that that wasn't going to work. I looked at Steve's Helicopter Controls, thought "hey, I can do that, and I'm willing to completely sacrifice the joystick" and put something together with an emphasis on materials on hand and quick completion.

These are the results.

There's work left to do:

• I need to put a setback on the cyclic stick and attach the original handle with buttons on that, so that you don't have to sit far forward when flying.
• I need to adjust the throw on the collective a bit.
• I'm still trying to figure out the right sensitivity for all controls.

But overall it's working fairly well. I used an old derailleur cable for the collective because I didn't want to extend any analog cables. The collective folds up vertical to put the whole thing beside the computer table. The pedals are adjustable because I didn't know how long to make 'em, and until I can get drawings or get in a real cockpit to measure I'm going to make the cyclic setback adjustable too.

Fixes for next time:

• Find a cheaper source for nylon bushings.
• Either use 3/8" threaded rod for all axles, or support both ends. I'm currently using 1/4", have let two people sit at it, and someone has already stomped on the pedals enough to bend axles slightly ("light touches!").
• More space in the cyclic box to allow for longer bellcranks on the potentiometers so that I can have finer throw adjustments.
• Figure out and build stops for limits for all of the sticks early on. I didn't know this time, but now I should be able to get specific.

Other cool homebuild cockpit resources:

• A full cockpit with chair that folds into a cabinet.
• The Simple Sim is another full cockpit design.
• FSCockpit has various notes on building your own.
• A simple hack to build a collective.
• Beta Innovations and Mindaugas have electronics interface stuff for building more complex cockpits. The latter has some free schematics and code, I haven't looked at the USB joystick interface spec but it seems it would a a good thing to use the full throw of the potentiometers and do quantizaiton and range stuff in the firmware.
• The R22 Cockpit Project is about building a simulator inside a salvage crashed actual Robinson 22 cockpit.

But having pedals and a long throw cyclic instantly put me from "dang, this is impossible" to "this is hard, but I'm starting to get a feel for it". I'm afraid I am going to have to break down and buy Microsoft Flight Simulator, the folks at Hovercontrol.com use it, and Dodo Sim's Realstart 206 Jetranger reality add-on runs on it.