Wednesday, 18 November 2009
Wednesday, 28 October 2009
Thrustmaster Support
http://ts.thrustmaster.com/eng/index.php?pg=email
I then submitted a support request indicating the problem and I supplied the part number I need. Here is a document that lists the available spares for the Cougar, the first column is the Thrustmaster part number.
Within a couple of hours they responded with this:
Thank you for your request. In order to resolve the issue you have encountered with your Hotas Cougar, please refer to our response herewith:
Spare part ordered: antenna potentiometer
Total price (shipping fees included): 8 US Dollars
Payment possibilities: money order, cash or Paypal.
Our address (for money order or cash):
Guillemot Inc.
C/o Technical Support
5800 St-Denis
Suite 1001
Montreal, Qc.
Canada H2S 3L5
For Paypal: [email protected] (DO NOT WRITE TO THIS ADDRESS, THAT IS ONLY FOR PAYMENTS FROM WWW.PAYPAL.COM).
After payment you will receive the part.
**** When you pay please note the following SPARE PART NUMBER: XXXXXXXXXXXX (VERY IMPORTANT TO NOTE THIS SPARE PART NUMBER PLEASE).
I had no problem paying by Pay Pal and I received another email within a day indicating that the part had been shipped. The part arrived in the post in two weeks. Great support.
Sunday, 2 November 2008
Recession Pedals
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 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.
Labels: Joysticks
Tuesday, 1 July 2008
Building Custom Controls
You can build very simple devices like pedals using just the gameport interface of your PC. Like these dodgey rudder pedals I made. To use additional switches and inputs you need something more than the gameport.
To interface your controls with your PC you are going to need a controller. The cheapest is to pull apart a keyboard and locate the controller that will have row and columns using a matrix (more on button matrices below).
Keyboard showing controller and button matrix. The black squares connected to the wires are the row and column matrices.
The following diagram demonstrates the functioning of a button matrix. When a button is depressed a circuit closes for a particular row and column combination. To prevent "phantom" key presses where keys you aren't intending to press are pressed diodes (the triangular & line symbol) are used. Keyboards don't use diodes because they are not designed to have multiple keys pressed simultaneously. If you plan to use a keyboard controller for a custom controller it does become a problem.
You'd think having USB and lots of buttons keyboards would be cheap and easy. But keyboard controllers are a major pain, because they appear to your PC as, well, a keyboard. This makes them extremely fiddly because you have to laboriously determine which row/column combination generates which key and then ensure you are wiring your switches to the right row/column combination. Gets even more complicated if you have to simulate two keys like CONTROL + M. Take a look at the top image of the keyboard, tracing keys back to the row/column inputs isn't easy. Alternatively you can randomly connect up the controller to your switches and then remap your keys in your simulation to suit the keypresses your switches end up generating. Remapping within the simulation isn't a good solution because you have to remember this remap as you may have to still use the keyboard if say a switch is in the wrong position and you can't move the switch but you still want to send the command.
One option might be to use Petr Medek's very clever HID Macros utility that allows you to remap the keys on a particular USB keyboard if you have multiple keyboards plugged into your computer. That may save you the hassle of working out the key matrix and just remapping the keys. Keyboards however don't have any axes for rotary or movement inputs like pedals, flaps, rudder, trim or throttle inputs and really aren't designed to have a lot of keys depressed at once.
The biggest problem with a keyboard interface is that they are designed for momentary switches (switches that you press and release) and not toggle switches. If you are using a toggle switch, when you turn the switch "on" the keyboard keeps repeating the keystroke. The only way around that is adding complexity with circuitry to eliminate the continued keypresses or pretty complicated reengineering of the toggle switch. There is some information on keyboard hacking for controllers at the 777 Project.
The next option is to pull apart a controller like a gamepad or joystick. This allows your controls to appear to Windows as a game controller allowing you to assign commands to the inputs. However the number of buttons on something like a gamepad or old joystick may become a limiting factor. You can use free software like SVMapper to only generate one keypress/button press with toggle switches and game controllers. SVMapper is a free utility found on the Sokhoi forums that allows you to map keys to game controller inputs, it can also handle toggle switches including mapping keys to the release of the toggle switch.
The next option is to make a USB controller from plans on the Internet. There are designs like the MJoy16. The original mindaugas.com site for the Mjoy16 is now offline, but the content is available from Webarchive.org. I gave this a go but could never get the thing to work, but was probably my fault. There there are several versions of this board (including versions not on the original website) some that don't work and several versions of the firmware. I've also read it can be fussy about the USB it is plugged into. But I probably cooked a component with my clumsy soldering. You can also buy DIY kits for Flight Simulator with components like the Master Card Kits from OpenCockpits or the FSBus project and Pic Home Cockpit Controller. Or you could completely custom build a PIC or AVR solution.
If you don't want to build, you can buy a USB controller and there is a LOT to choose from. Choosing the boards basically comes down to how much you want to spend, what you need to do (in terms of number of switches and axes you need) and whether you want to integrate gauges and light.
For a basic button and analogue inputs (for dials, pedals, throttles etc) Leo Bodnar has a couple of very inexpensive and feature rich boards including boards that support load cells. Load cells are force sensitive devices that allow you to push down on a pedal and have that force translate into throttle or braking without the pedal having to move. Load cells are popular with people building car racing controls. Leo also has a new board that allows direct cabling into the board and does not require any diodes:
I have one of his earlier boards that use a matrix:
There are others like the EPIC and Hagstrom boards, but these are more expensive than Leo's board and aren't as feature rich or easy to implement as the slightly more expensive Beta Innovations boards. Beta Innovations provides software called Falcon 4 Interface Manager that supports the Falcon 4 Shared Memory allowing lights and gauges to be driven. It is the easiest and best interface solution for Falcon 4. Beta Innovations has similar software called RSim for car racing sims including Rfactor, LFS and GTR allowing you to have speedometers and tachometers. Recently the Beta Innovations Plasma MM2 is price competitive with the Leo Bodnar board with a similar feature set.
If money is no object you can buy complete setups from places including:
FlightDeck Solutions
Fly Engravity
Cockpit Sonic
Hisapanels
Labels: Joysticks
Saturday, 15 December 2007
Cougar U2Nxt
That was fixed by reversing the axes and altering the axis shaping in the Cougar Control Panel.
Sunday, 2 December 2007
DIY Rudder Pedals
This is the circuit of a basic IBM gameport joystick interface:
This is the circuit people use with the Thrustmaster Cougar gameport interface:
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.
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
Labels: Joysticks
Monday, 5 November 2007
Joysticks
I've owned the following joysticks:
- CH Products Flightstick
- Microsoft Sidewinder 3D Pro
- Saitek X-36 gameport HOTAS (hands on throttle and stick)
- Saitek X-52 HOTAS
- Thrustmaster Cougar HOTAS
The CH Flightstick was easily the smoothest, most accurate and best quality controller I've ever owned. It took an absolute hammering in space sims including X-Wing and worked faultlessly for a very long time. I stopped using it when I needed a joystick with a POV (point of view) hat. Years later when I was using the Saitek X-36 I pinched a potentiometer out of the FlightStick to keep the X-36 going after a X-36 potentiometer wore out.
My first HOTAS, the Saitek X-36 gameport (not USB) was great value, looked reasonably realistic but very quickly wore out. Also it used a AT keyboard pass through arrangement and was unable to be used reliably with newer PS2 motherboards or versions of Windows beyond Windows 98. It became obsolete as Saitek dropped support for it. But incredibly, I've since found third party drivers created by Alfredo Costalogo to run the X-36 gameport under Windows 2000, XP and Vista including 64 bit! You can find Alfredo Costalogos website at http://x36driver.byethost13.com/. He has some developers docs on the X-36 as well. I still have my X-36, but I haven't tried any of his drivers myself yet.
The Thrustmaster Couger I'd read a lot about. People talked about the incredible metal controller with the powerful Foxy software. The first and only time I saw it for sale in a shop was in a Hardly Normal store in Brisbane and they were asking an insane $650 (AUD) for it. On Ebay even the second hand ones seemed to go for $400+. Way too expensive, so I settled on a Saitek X-52 choosing that over the CH HOTAS because I couldn't get "hands-on" locally with the CH HOTAS before buying it and it was both more expensive outright and required delivery charges.
What is a Thrustmaster Cougar like? Well it is the most user-hostile computer peripheral I have ever experienced in all my time computing. I've used a lot of stuff so that is really saying something. It just isn't for people without a lot of commitment and perseverance. Many people get them broken out of the box, with a large batch missing the grease inside that is absolutely necessary to stop the poor quality metal insides (the "gimbals") quickly turning into a pile of metal shavings. (The gimbals are the part inside the base of the joystick that translate the joystick movement into the turns of a potentiometer). So first thing you have to do is pull it apart and check and possibly grease it. There can be an issue with the speedbrake that you have to check and fix before it breaks and some have an issue with the antenna knob potentiometer spiking. My Cougar antenna rotary dial has a large dead zone, that is movement at the end of the turn of the knob that doesn't provide input. The throttle has an incredibly loud annoying clicking indents that to remove requires you to disassemble and mod the throttle. The throttle intents are (I've read) in the wrong place anyway. The stick itself is incredibly stiff out of the box because of the rubber boot around the bottom of the joystick and the resistance springs, you can end up with a sore arm after a long session using it. The pinky toggle lacks feedback and feels a little weak like it could break at any time, but I haven't seen reports of this happening - it just feels a little flimsy. And the red button on the top of the stick doesn't feel very good - not providing effective tactile feedback that you've pressed it correctly.
And that is before you even install the software, plug it in and update the firmware. Once it has installed the eight devices in your computer you then have a very elaborate calibration to go through. You can chose to let the device auto-calibrate if you don't have issues with your rotary knobs. If you bork a step in the manual calibration you have to start right from the beginning. You've then got a calibrated Windows joystick. To use the programming capabilities you use Foxy which is completely intimidating. Here is some sample Foxy button code from Jastangs Falcon 4 Profile:
BTN H1U /I /H KU(X3) Trim_Nose_Down
/O /P KD(X1) DLY(100) KU(X1) /R Glance_Fwd_Rel
BTN H1D /I /P /H KU(X3) Trim_Nose_Up /R KD(X47) DLY(60) KU(X47)
/O /P KD(X20) DLY(100) KU(X20) /R Glance_Back_Rel
BTN H1L /I /H KU(X3) Trim_Roll_Left
/O KD(X23) DLY(100) KU(X23)
BTN H1R /I /H KU(X3) Trim_Roll_Right
/O KD(X24) DLY(100) KU(X24))
Even if you use an existing profile the setup is very involved. For example, take a look at the no less than twenty eight steps in setting up Jastangs Falcon 4 profile. And you will probably find things in the profile you need to change anyway requiring you to mod the profile code.
I knew that the Cougar wasn't for the faint hearted and was prepared to do the reading and learn Foxy. The one thing that I wasn't prepared for was the slop around the centre position of the joystick. I can't even begin to describe how much the centre play completely pisses me off. It totally detracts from the stick making it feel cheap which it is certainly not. It is completely unforgivable that a stick this expensive has this much centre play. If you've come from CH products you'd be astounded that it got past QA and left the factory in this condition. I found the cause on my stick is the poor fit of the stem of the base of the joystick into the gimbals. It has about 1.5 mm mismatch in the gimbals which doesn't sound like much but that translates to 6 mm of centre play at the top of the stick. By centre play I mean movement of the stick that doesn't translate into movement of your plane, it also feels very loose and sloppy. There is a document available in a zip file on the Cougarworld website (7 MB) that describes the three types of axis play you can experience with the Cougar.
To fix these issues people mod the Cougar either adjusting the existing gimbals or more commonly with complete replacements for the gimbals. The replacements the Uber II Nxt replacement gimbals and the hall sensors it requires or the RealSimulator force sensing kits are expensive and are DIY. The list of fixes and mods for the Cougar can be viewed on the Cougarworld site at Frugalsworld.