I've been looking for an excuse to buy these and build something. Motorized slide potentiometers. People into music production tend to like them.
that isn't me... but it's kind of me.
My Cougar might be serial... it's that old. I dunno, I guess step one is to find it and evaluate.
This made me curious about what it would take to make a guitar pedal with the stuff I already have. I use a lot of ESP32 WROOM boards. Something I haven't done with it yet, but it has Audio to Digital and Digital to Audio onboard and you only need 1 pin each. Low sampling rate & resolution, but it works. You can hook up external ADC/DAC and plug the output into a DSP to clean it up. Probably a 3-4 hour 3d print to make a small housing, you can draw it in tinkerCAD in 30 minutes. Power with a phone charger. You don't even need switch inputs, it can run a web server onboard and you can change settings with a phone or tablet. Or have switches and knobs and sliders. Or both.
Most effect code is simple, some is really complex. Depends. You can fit a shitload of effects on 1 board though. wah wah, tremolo, distortion, flanger, looper, compression, blah blah blah.
Yeah the Cougar HOTAS was such a mixed bag. Great feel, shit internals. I had TM ship me new gimbals, swapped those in, wrapped the electronics in a plastic bag, and used a shitload of bearing grease on the new gimbals. That kept it from eating itself, but now I'd just go Virpl. It's all the external nice bits of the TM stuff, improved, and with best in class internals now.
I got 100 boards from PCBWay in this week. 4 layer boards that are breakout boards that hold a pair of ESP32 WROOM processors, and jst connectors for power, rgb strip, rfid reader. I can't complain at all. A friend uses JCL. Same quality boards showed up. So far we've only ordered bare boards and soldered ourselves. We're sitting in a Discord right now finishing up a parallel battery board design that 8 lipos plug into and has a lc709602 battery monitor chip that's surface mounted, and connects to these ESP32 boards. These will be the first we've had assembled in China, I don't want to try and solder these tiny surface mount devices, so I'm interested to see what shows up at our door.
Making your own button box wouldn't be that big of a project
BTW did you guys know that many public libraries nowadays have 3d printing services ?
It's a very reasonable hobby project. I do a lot of arduino work and I have a 3d printer. You can churn out parts. You can get all preassembled breakouts with rotaries, slides, even those sweet powered sliders like you see on high end studio mixer boards, tons of rgb lights, touch sensors. Even if you don't know how to code it's within reach, a couple hours with ChatGPT and you'll be compiling your custom setup in c++ and testing at least a breakout board version of what you want to build.
If you felt the urge to build your own guitar pedal, Flux.AI is really easy to learn and you can make a PCB, have it made in china in a week, 3d print a pedal to put the board, switch, and stereo plug into and you're off & playing.
you don't have to though, button boxes are affordable and do everything you'd want in flight and racing sims.
Does anyone just sell... what I would call a "Modular USB Switch Stack"? Just a stackable box with "X" amount of assignable switches/knobs on it? Is the FS community large enough to even pretend to cater to anymore? I remember back in the day talking about cannibalizing old broken/worn out sticks for the switches...
Close. That's the "Button Box". They come in so many different flavors it's ridiculous. They're all usb and you can assign anything to anything in most sims or games. RicmoTech, RealGear, ignitION, Extreme Simracing, Racebox. They come in generic versions, and ones specific to space sims, flight sims, farming sims, racing, streaming, etc. Stack as many as you have usb ports for. You can have custom built ones made for you on Etsy now.
Sim hardware is the biggest and best it has ever been, even for flight sims. There's now youtubers that do nothing but DCS and have 500k subscribers.
Well, my take on DCS is there's a bewildering amount of buttons and control interfaces to deal with, so yeah I can see if you get a "system" that has like 50 buttons, it could be preferable for DCS.
Virbl is modular. It began a long time ago as a guy making titanium replacement gimbals and drop in hall sensor replacements for the TM Cougar HOTAS. That system shipped without grease and shitty gimbals that ate themselves, and this guys hardware made them invincible. With the hall sensor setup the HOTAS became pressure based like a legit gen 4 fighter stick.
Nowadays you can get 2 stick bases, the warbird base or the mongoose base and use any stick with them. The warbird base has a lot more throw. The mongoose is higher quality and you can adjust it while using it. So you can lock some things in place and there's no center return, it's a legit floppy stick. They have extensions so you can floor or seat mount it. There's 5 right handed and 2 left handed options for sticks, the cheapest one of them a stripped down warbird stick that's great for AH. It has followed sim racing where you get a wheel base and many wheel options so you can hot swap to whatever you're driving that session.
They only have 1 throttle option but it's a split throttle which can lock together so it's a really nice feature to have in any game. I continue to be a huge fan of CH pedals. It's what I always used... but Virpl pedals are better, and you can get a damper accessory that makes them feel really nice. The spring return on CH feels like shit after you use dampened pedals. I'm sure eventually that damper will be force feedback too.
Button boxes are one of the most underrated things to have. Virpl's are crazy overpriced though. iRacing ones are cheaper and have the same amount of buttons. You don't need shit on your stick, but it's nice to not have to use the keyboard for landing gear or engine starts, something that has no place on a limited button warbird joystick. More convenient and easier to mount than the traditional keyboard-under-monitor.
Flight Sim stuff is the best it's ever been. There still exists low end twisty sticks. Saitek X52 is still around for the low end of the mid-range. Thrustmaster still making good mid-range stuff. There's a new mid-range brand called Gladiator from VBK that people like. The really good stuff is Virpil.
A waste of gametime IMO.
I too think HT had it about right. If you need more than that...go rent an aircraft.
I think with the MA it's not even an option. DCS can handle 128 players max, but if you have 24 it's already a lot. The MA when I played routinely had 500+ and eventually they split it into 2 MA which sucked really bad. There's no time to learn to fly, all of the time has to be spent learning to fight and to expedite that, most procedural stuff has to be reduced to a button or automated.
There isn't much of a manual to the planes you want to fly and starting them is easy enough. You could watch a couple of YouTube videos and learn what you need to know fairly quickly.
If it's not "E" for engine, the learning curve is too high. Click for wep, no engine seizures. Fucking auto-trim. HTC was the only one to nail the balance between arcade and sim. Everything else either felt like a rinse & repeat action game (war thunder) or some shit made for an arcade game to take your money at dave & busters (blazing eagles), or it's an over the top sim that expects you to crank your own gear down in VR.
Exactly. I looked to see if they named the CGI company but couldn't find one.
DCS beats heck out of what MotA did.
DNEG
Adjusted for inflation they paid as much for this as they did Band of Brothers, and it looks like shit.
My BIL is a service mgr at a Porsche store. He really, in his heart, believed that rich customers were going to be easier to deal with than middle class Nissan customers.
Yeah that's not working out like he thought it was. Even rich people shit their pants when you tell them $20,000 for a pair of headlights.
I suppose it was only a matter of time before trumpettes started openly admiring the Taliban. It's not a surprise. You're all Bronze Age Middle Easter Goat Herder Magicians who hate Amurica and Freedumb.
"I felt like I could relate more to the monkey bar guys, they're more my speed."
Or, they'd get wiped out. Look I'm an idea guy not a logistics guy. Either way, it's win win all around.
I'm a logistics guy 
"God's Army" is awfully tiny. Can't move with that. I've lead bigger paintball teams.
No. We have Free Speech, for however long that lasts.
It's the Progressives that want to have it both ways. "There is no such thing as an illegal, our economy will collapse without immigrants, just don't drop them off here".
