Recession Pedals

I recently stopped in at the recycling shop. Amongst the old Pentium mainboards, countless IDE CDROMs, PS2 keyboards and other IT junk was a set of MadCatz Playstation driving pedals. Sitting there without the driving wheel and with the 9 pin cable hanging, they were supremely useless.

But what interested me was unlike a lot of driving pedals, the pedals were both the same size. Plus they seemed to have a simple and robust push mechanism. So I coughed up the $5 (ripoff!) and bought them.

Taking them home I start work, building a new set of pedals using whatever wood and other junk I had at home, including cannablising my first home made pedals. I had no set plan or design, just letting it come together.

I cut the pedals into two even halves:

Reinforced the base with some wood and found the potentiometers were 50K Ohm.

I then put the pedals onto a wooden frame:

I reused the potentiometer, VCR gears, springs and some of the wood from my old pedals. I reused the black cable originally on the pedals to wire up the potentiometers, and mounted the gameport interface on screws through two tubes cut from a bit of garden watering system.

The end result - rudder pedals with toe brakes:


Cost me an additional $5 for some new gameport plugs I used with a long old printer cable to make a 3 metre lead from the pedals to my Cougar. Rest of the stuff I had (bolts, screws, wood, rudder pot), or recycled from my first DIY pedals (VCR gears, springs). So $10 all up. I tried not to spend any more money on the pedals, just using what I had working around some issues (like my bolts being too long) as I encountered them. The frame is a bit dodgey and the feet should be on some sort of runner or slide, but it works ok. For wiring the three pots I used the circuit diagram on the Cougarsworld site for adding pedals with foot brakes to the Cougar.

I was very relieved that when I plugged the pedals into my Cougar and I plugged it all into my PC, that the circuit board on my Cougar didn't fry. I would have like to put some buttons on the pedals for brakes for sims like Falcon 4 that don't support differential braking but the circuit into the Cougar gameport doesn't support them as far as I know.

The pedals are a lot better than my old DIY ones, being more robust with better wiring. I'm finding it is a lot easier to taxi now using the differential brakes. I did have to stuff around a bit to set them up in the Cougar control panel and struggled for a few minutes in Microsoft Flight Simulator till I realised I had to reverse the inputs for the brakes otherwise the brakes were on all the time when the pedals were not depressed.

But working ok now. Pretty happy with the result, was an interesting project and great for taking my mind off work for a bit.