DIY Rudder Pedals

It is really easy (and fun) to make your own rudder pedals using the gameport interface of your PC.

This is the circuit of a basic IBM gameport joystick interface:

Source: Flightsim.com

If you build your rudder pedals using this interface your pedals appear to Windows as a simple joystick with axes and buttons.

This is the circuit people use with the Thrustmaster Cougar gameport interface:

Source: Frugalsworld.com Forums

For a simple rudder you just have to make a single 100 k Ohm linear potentiometer turn. If you want to get tricky you can add two additional potentiometers on the foot pedals to provide car-like differential braking for each pedal. That is you depress the pedal and you get variable brakes. I mainly play Falcon 4, and Falcon 4 doesn't support differential braking. The toes of my rudder pedals are simply hinged allowing the toes to press buttons that can be assigned to brakes. I used an existing gameport cable from an old broken joystick to connect up the switches and potentiometer. On the unused axes I put a 50 k Ohm resistor.



I made a simple wooden set of pedals. The first version, the Mark I "Dodgey Pedals" had the pedals attached to a sliding potentiometer with string. At the time I didn't have any gears to use a rotary potentiometer.

Rotary and Linear Potentiometers

Rubber bands provided resistance and centred the pedals. This worked but was rubbish as the strings stretched and the sliding potentiometer wouldn't return to the centre accurately. Bring on the Mark II.

The Mark II dodgey pedals use two geared wheels to turn the potentiometer. The gears are out of an old DVD player. This works very well providing more accuracy than the old sliding potentiometer. The resistance and self-centreing are provided by two extension springs.


I'm pretty happy with my DIY pedals, they only cost a few dollars and work well. I'm starting to think about a Mark III that will have two additional rotary potentiometers and have differential braking.

If you want to assign keystrokes to joystick button presses (that is DirectX buttons), I'd recommend the freeware program SVMapper from the amazing guys on the Sukhoi forums (download link). It is also available from my downloads page but it may not be the latest version available. The cool feature of SVMapper is that is allows keystrokes to be bound to the release of a control. This is a neat feature if you are using toggle switches.

SVMapper showing button to key assignments.

There are some much better thought out, more complex and better engineered examples of DIY rudder pedals:

Ubi Forums - DIY Metal Pedals
Flightsim.com - Rudder pedals with toebrakes
Flightsim.com - Rudder pedals
Flightsim.com - Build your own Cessna Type Rudder Pedals

General Electronics Help:
Basic Car Audio Electronics - Basic Electronics
Instructables.com - How to solder