Alright. its my summer holiday and i feel like building a throttle quadrant... so this is the start of my official thread series (soon ill be up there building my own sim-pit... but i guess you gotta start low with something like this  )

anyway,

the design will follow the tutorial here: http://www.simpits.org/articles/throttle_quad/throtquad.html

i plan to make the frame out of wood, and so will the rest no doubt. i may find a nice design to do by, but its something basic and isnt hugely needed to look nice. any images would be nice, just to start.

the quadrant will be default work through a gameport connection, but i plan to buy a £5 converter between gameport and USB... so hopefully it will work


im just unsure on where i could buy the gameport plug. im in the north west of england if anyone knows a good place/website.

also, one of my more exciting ideas i might want to encorporate is, taking a motor from an old  and dead Xbox controller and some how making it react to whats on the screen... i think that would be a nice tough feeling your landing like that


anywho, any questions/comments/images/tutorials/feedback would be appreciated

i hope you like my homebrew idea.

cheers

thanks.. just one question, i keep on hearing the phrase 'pot' like you said. what does this actually refer to?

Although watch what you buy for this project, he suggests a 200K ohm linear taper. lets see if I can find one:

There is one on this page

http://www.surplussales.com/Potentiometers/PBM-Shafted/PBM-Shafted-9.html

Cool I can not wait, looks like I might build my own using that link! Thanks for the info

machineman,

Good to see you taking on a project like this.  Go for it.  You'll find it can become addicitive.  

When you get the pots (you know what that means now)... make sure to get LINEAR and not LOGRYTHMIC or AUDIO TAPER.  "Linear" in this case means that the pots total resistance is evenly divided along the full amount of travel of the unit.  The other types are designed for other uses than what we want.

There are options of both rotary pots and slider pots.  Rotarys you turn ... sliders move in straight lines.  In some ways, sliders can make physical connections simpler.  Think about which you might choose.

Spend a lot of time on the DESIGN side...before you start cutting and soldering.

best,

......................john

You know, I might join the club and start a simple simpit of my own.

I've been watching Rotty's and John's pits growing for some time now, and although I understand that at my age and with my skills it just isnt possible for me to build something of that calibre, I might be able to get somewhere.

I have the great asset of going to a school where we have four DT workshops, tens of thousands of pounds worth of equipment, vaccuum formers, laser cutters, etc, and I have nothing to do in my lunch hours.

I might start work on a throttle quadrant myself; I already have a few gameport to usb adapters lying around and a few peices of wood.

I'll keep you all posted, so if you hear nothing within a few weeks you'll know that this has turned into another of those countless projects that goes nowhere 

Akula_dude,

Join the club!

USE those resources you have at school!!!!!!  To quote joni Mitchell, "You don't know what you've got til it's gone."

If you have a CNC machine you can easily set it up to cut out and then engrasve panel lettering for backlighting.  That is a MAJOR thing.

best,

...................john

machineman9 wrote on Aug 10^th, 2007 at 10:20am:


I suppose it depends on what pot's you get. I'm only looking to build 1 throttle, as I mostly fly combat sims in fighter aircraft, but if I build this throttle successfuly I will definitely build a 4-engine quadrant for bombers.

Speaking of which, I went through the maplins catalogue today, and there were several types of pots. Does it really matter what kind I get? And what values should I be looking for, I've read in tutorials that 100Kohm is about right?