The base is complete, now for the wiring.
I hooked up the axis sensors to the Bodnar board and just used it as a simple joystick and it worked great. I am very not used to having something with a 24"+ extension. The stepper motors give it a bit of notchy feel being unpowered, hopefully with them energized that will smooth out.
For some reason it didn’t occur to me to get something like a protoboard, until after I’d already started soldering connectors in. And once you’ve started doing things the hard way, well you might as well finish it that way right? So soldering in 2 sets of connectors for each wire wasn’t enough fun, the 6 wires for the hat switch? 6" too short. 
Oh well, worse ways to spend the night.
I also decided to knock together something I’ve been thinking about forever.
A throttle to clip onto the side of laptop tray. Tested it and it works great. Going to make a handgrip, and probably add a 4 way hat at the end of it, 3 way switch for speed brakes, maybe 1 or 2 buttons for whatever. if anyone has a suggestion for a good 3 way switch let me know. I think I’m going to use the Bodnar Micro-BBI to control the whole thing, 1 axis and 20 buttons should cover everything I can think of.
Did you see my 4 way hat design in my Viggen stick thread?
I’d be happy to send the files for you to print, and the hardware needed to make it.
I have a couple.
One sliding and one pivoting.
Or you could use a regular DPDT ON/OFF/ON switch and wire it for ON/ON/ON.
I did! How big is it? I was planning on keeping the handgrip smaller due to the limited space around my laptop on the tray.
Much obliged, don’t worry about the hardware unless it’s something esoteric. Thanks!
Info on the sliding 3 way switch would be appreciated, I think that will be easier to fit and work around then a pivoting switch (we’ll find out at least).
Esoteric hardware? I only use of the shelf stuff… Ok, you may have to sell your soul, for some of the parts, but it’s totally worth it! Promise! 
I’ll see what I can dig up. I have a few of the, switches, so I could send a couple to you.
Oh, and the trim switch is pretty much life size… The part that goes into the grip has a diameter of 1 inch. I’m not home until monday, so that will have to wait.
A part number would be fine, but I’m not gonna say no either lol
I was planning on 1.25" going bigger isn’t a huge deal. Length is more the issue, since I only have about 4-5" to work with between the edge of the tray and blocking my keyboard. I can play with bending the throttle arm though, ought to be able to get another inch or two of clearance if I need it.
I’ll get you some measurments of the trim hat assembly. I’d be honored if you’d use it in your setup! 
I’ll just send a couple of 3 way switches and a trim switch, if you can wait a couple of weeks.
Oh, BTW. By 3 way switch you mean one that’s closed in all 3 positions, right? Switches that are open in the middle pos. are rather common.
I would be honored to use it! Yes, closed in all 3 positions. No rush on anything, I’m still working away on the cyclic project as the main time killer currently.
Wiring mostly complete. Powered it up, stepper motors engaged, nothing exploded or melted. I’m calling that a win so far! No pictures as it’s just a mess of wires everywhere, as I hacked together the power routing just to verify everything was connected correctly. The next major item is I need to figure out exactly how I’m going to mount the power supply and fuse block, then make that happen. That will let me finalize the power wiring.
I should be good finishing the wiring harnesses from the breakout board to the Arduino and the Bodnar board. That shouldn’t take to long, and once that’s done I can tidy it up for some pictures. I’ll be making some changes to the original wiring to run the buttons largely to the Bodnar board. For the beep trim the outputs need to go to the Arduino, but otherwise if the buttons go the Bodnar board they’re plug and play for use.
After that I still need to address the biggest question, where the heck am I going to setup this thing? That will ultimately determine the cable loom setup between the stick and control box, where the power supply goes, etc. Decisions, decisions.
Quite nicely, I was going 30mm on the handgrip diameter, so that should slide in end without drama.
Did some rewiring before work yesterday and making some design decisions now that I’ve done some more research (that I probably should have started with, oh well).
First off how the grip is wired. For this project as I’ve researched how the stepper motors are controlled and such, I realized that the force trim disconnect can be a literal electrical switch, versus making it software controlled. Wiring that separately from the logical switches makes much more sense and saves me having to code anything for the force trim disconnect.
Speaking of coding, the original design uses mobiflight to program the controls. After doing some reading, coding to run the steppers directly via the Arduino isn’t complicated (and I like programming). Doing that versus using mobiflight makes the force trim and beep trim completely software agnostic. It will work on a PC, a Mac, a console for that matter, as the Arduino is doing all the work with no outside connection. I’d just have to use a power adaptor to the Arduino as it wouldn’t be hooked up via USB. Since this sucker requires a power supply to run the stepper motors anyway, no biggie I can just connect the Arduino up to that.
Next the location of the Bodnar board. The designed setup of having the control boards and the stepper drivers in a separate enclosure is workable, and with the designed cyclic only having a few inputs it’s not that big of a cable loom between the two. If you do something like an Apache cyclic, that’s a different story with a much more substantial cable loom. I am thinking of moving the Bodnar board to the stick base itself which would make it a self-contained joystick, albeit without the force or beep trim. For testing at least (and since it’s already wired that way) I’ll leave it be, but it’s on my to look at list.
Lastly, I would like to be able to use different grips, and not have to fish wires every time. At the high end you have something like the Apache or F-16 with about 20 inputs across 3-4 hat switches and some buttons. At the low end the classic B-8 grip with 1 hat and 3-4 buttons. So some kind of scalable connector system needed. I have some ideas, but they mainly resolve around using a matrix button board, and moving the joystick control board to the joystick base as I mentioned above.
It’s ALIVE! Totally forgot to shoot video, sorry. I’ll upload something this weekend. Steppers are being controlled by the Arduino, the force trim disconnect switch works perfectly. If I didn’t want beep trim, it’d be ready to roll, but I do.
Which is where the trouble started…
Spent easily an hour without success on how to get the Arduino to recognize the hat switch and use it to control the trim. Tried it with the switches digital high, digital low, analog, nada. Finally in an act of desperation, I pulled out the multimeter to confirm wiring, maybe it was a bad switch? Oh that would have been way too simple, and not my fault. Rather, the wire I had wired as common is the wrong wire
Well, no wonder nothing worked, I’m not even sure what I had allegedly wired as the common (I believe it’s one of the rotary encoder outputs). So that’s a project for this weekend, pull the grip back apart (again), fix that and hopefully put the majority of the build to bed. Or I may do the lazy thing and just swap things in the connector, which ought to do the trick.
Just for you @troll:
So 40 minutes of insomnia later at 0430 CST this morning I have written the code for the beep trim to work, and swapped the location of the wires in the connecter, I just need to plug everything in and try it. Fast forward to 10 minutes ago.
The testing setup. Yes it’s an absolute dumpster fire of cabling, as everything is designed to run from one breakout to the other in a nice loom, not be parked next to each other and stretched across. Also the power distribution is from whatever random pieces of wire I had laying around to fit the spade connectors. Needless to say it will all be redone once I figure out how I’m mounting the power supply. For this demo yes the mains are exposed, obviously don’t do that yourself and practice proper electrical safety.
Here is a video of things working as designed. It starts with the force trim disconnect switch pressed which allows the axises to move freely. Then the switch is released so now the springs are constraining moving it from the trimmed position. Then we use the beep trim to trim back to release pressure, then we move stick left, and trim left to release pressure. Finally, just trimming it around a bit, followed by pressing the force trim deactivation switch again to move it freely.
I have the beep trim set extremely slow (about 20-30 seconds end to end) to give me time to either hit the force trim disconnect or the power switch if something untoward happened. It’s an easy adjustment to change, though I have zero clue what an accurate speed is. Also, with the extension length on it currently, the range of motion is way too large for most aircraft as I have about ~2’/~60cmof movement in each direction reach now.
Also in the trim, I’m going to set trim limits just to prevent breaking the gear on stepper motor with regularity. They’re a 20 minute print, so no big deal, but adding in a limit to the stepper movement is easy enough with a couple of limit switches. If anyone would like the Arduino code let me know and I’ll PM it to you.
For some reason this reminded me of the classic “Magic/More Magic” MIT story.
Cool project, looks like you’re moving right along. Gonna be a joy to fly with when it’s complete, thanks for sharing!
That is really cool!
I need to finish my Viggen stick and then I’ll tackle my FFB stick again…
And what do you do when you’ve “finished a project”? You start tweaking it.
So doing he math for a 2m/~7’ loom between the stick and control box I’m looking at close to 70m of wire. Doable, but that’s for only 4 buttons and a hat switch along with the stepper motors and controls. Something like the Apache I’d be close to 300m of wire, which seems excessive. To be able to drive the steppers and the beep trim I’m stuck with a minimum of 12 wires.
The first step is moving the Bodnar joystick control board to the stick itself, on the extension. That plan is to add a matrix board, wired to a 36 pin connector, that would mate to the base of various grips. That would allow the stick to be used as a standalone minus the trim features. And replace a whole lot of wire with one USB cable.
Just wait until you want to redo the whole thing…
Oh that’s already planned, now that I know what I’m doing with stepper motors and the arduino. I just need to be more on my CAD game.
