http://nzff.org/forum/index.php?autocom=blog Community Blog List Syndication Sun, 03 Feb 2013 17:16:34 +1300 nzff@nzff.org (New Zealand Flightsim Forums) IP.Blog 60
Thanks ]]> Fri, 03 Oct 2008 06:45:00 +1300
It was a nice flight, but my shoulder is feeling kinda tired now. The one gripe I have with the sidewinder is that the Rudder springs are too stiff meaning you (well, I) have to put quite a bit of effort into holding the bird straight.

Earlier today I uninstalled my graphics card drivers and installed the latest set. Even with all my settings maxed I was getting decent frame rates, though they dropped a lot over CHCH international. All in all it was a nice enjoyable flight, interupted only by chocolate cake. Gotta hate them interruptions, aye?]]> Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:48:00 +1200
I tried a real weather flight today at Wellington airport. Was praticing just flying down the runway in 40k winds, and was having a lot of fun with it until the winds around here knocked the power out, heh.

Tonight I loaded up at Whangarei airport, and flew between there, and Creator2003's Kensington Park. Once down I checked the replay, powered up and flew back again. Kept doing this route for 1.2 hours, a few hairy moments but no crashes. It was fun flying without GPS, just learning the scenery, where to turn, best aproach angle etc.

I'm thinking that I might just be good enough now to go back to my old practice run, which was from the airstrip at Paraparaumu to the helipro building (scenery from these forums) and into the carpark behind the chain-link fence. Small landing area with a high fence to negotiate.]]> Wed, 30 Jul 2008 21:50:00 +1200
As this is not something I can afford this week, I am revising my plans. Tomorrow, I will start making some prototypes. My head is buzzing with ideas for pedals, collective and cyclic but I need to see whether anything I have can be utilised. At this point, I am hoping I can get away with purchasing some glue and some bolts - I should have everything else.

I have a vague idea that I will be building the cyclic stick with no centering mechanism, but I am worried about calibration in windows. The calibration wizard calls for the center point twice. I am thinking I may get around this by introducing locking pins that will hold the stick dead centre on both axes. Put in the pins, calibrate centerpoint, remove pins, calibrate motion range, replace the pins, recalibrate centrepoint. It sounds kinda clunky, but it could work. I am also wondering if I were to calibrate it as a flight yoke that this problem would be avoided - but I do not know enough about this.

I have removed the head of my precision pro to use for the cyclic and I have a numberpad for the head of the collective. I'm also playing with the idea of incorporating speakers into a pair of earmuffs, along with a small earbud speaker. The plan (if its solid enough to call a plan) is to have the game sounds (stereo) through to the larger speakers, and voice, on a separate soundcard, to go through to the earbud, and to mount a small condenser mic on a boom for voice. I am having trouble hearing people on teamspeak over the cockpit noise, and I am hoping this will allow me to set the voice volume high enough to hear without distortion, and without it being affected by the game noise. To put that another way, I find that when both game sound, and TS sound travel through the same card the sound on both distorts too much. The earmuffs may also muffle outside noises enough to enhance the sim experience. Alternatively the setup might just be too hot and uncomfortable to wear.]]> Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:38:00 +1200
I have been spending a lot of time installing freeware sceneries (esp those that i can find for NZ with helipads).
Still flying the modified bell 206. Last night I got a hover of +/- 1 foot/s which I was pretty stoked with. The sensitivity of the stick is incredible now, and it operates correctly. I can land a heli with a gentle touch down, even on top of a building in 26k winds. To be honest I never thought I could get that much control.

The Precision Pro is another matter alltogether. For some reason it now operates in one quarter of the calibration window which is really odd. No matter what I do it only operates there and I cannot work out why.

Still looking up ideas for building rudders and pedals. I guess the problem is that I have now looked at so many designs that they are all getting mixed up in my head. Seeing as I have to do this while spending as little money as possible I will probably be going for a mostly wood design with reused pots from around the house - broken stereos etc. Ideally I would love to go with hall sensors, or even home made LDVTs, and a home made USB controller - but these may be later adaptions. I am hoping to rip some stuff apart later today and see what pots I do have. Ideally, I would like 4 linear pots that are a little higher than 1kohm to give me a bit of leeway.

The rudders will need to be linked in that when I push one down, the other will raise, but the mechanics of this seem simple enough. I have seen enough designs for cable and pots. I will have to see what scraps I have around. Someone ingenious even uses fishing line for cable but I am hoping I can do better than this. I also have some gearwheels left over from a dismantled stereo cassette deck, and these may be useful. I just suspect that the engineering required to get these mounted to the axis and pot mechs with accuracy will be beyond me.

For the cyclic stick, I may cut the shape from wood and sand it round (lots of work). I wanted to do it out of metal pipe, but again, finances prevent this. At this stage, I can see that I will be forking out for a gameport plug, plus some bolts and washers, and perhaps some new drill bits. (All mine have been packed away when my wife decided we were going to move in the next two weeks, about 1 year ago).]]> Tue, 29 Jul 2008 09:11:00 +1200
After cleaning and re-greasing the stick, I made a new washer for it, but found that the stick still has some slop in the center. I made a second and third washer and still have not eliminated this. Either the thickness of the three washers is not enough, or this fix will simply not work.

I wasn't sure if this joystick had optical sensors like the first but was able to confirm that it does. I had wondered about pulling some pots out of one of these two sticks to build my pedals or collective lever, but clearly this will not be happening. This is not necessarily a problem though, as I can still go back to the idea of linking a brake cable to the throttle control on one of these sticks. I may have to do some tests and see if the Precision Pro has any slop in the rudder or throttle controls, and if not, this may become my collective and rudder - somehow.



I have spent some more flight time in FS9 with the 3D Pro and I am very happy with the results - though the thickness on this may be a little too much as the side to side axis does not quite return to true each time. This means that the heli is pitching left or right somewhat. Having said this, my ability to hover is now 100 times better than it had been and the pitch can be countered by keeping an eye on what is happening.



Yesterday I was also able to shoot into Jaycar and drool over all the electrical components for 30 minutes or so. They have a number of pots, and some gears which may prove useful when it comes to making the rudders (if I do not create some kind of frankenstick for these).]]> Fri, 25 Jul 2008 09:49:00 +1200
I have two early sidewinder joysticks. One of these is the original Sidewinder 3D Pro, and the second is the next model up, which I grabbed from the Salvation Army shop for 3 bucks. The problem with both of these sticks is that while the springs on the x,y, and rudder axes are still firm, there is a huge amount of play or slop in the centre zone. Just touching the stick is enough to knock it out of true. The slop is also uneven, so it will move one cm left before resistance starts but only .5cm to the right. Similar problems plagued the up/down axis, and the rudder too.

I recalled reading a site a long time ago detailing how to maintain the stick and correct these problems. While I have been (till now) skeptical about how effective this would be, I was getting more and more frustrated with the stick and decided to give it a crack.

I pulled the 3D pro to pieces, applied grease to the moving parts, popped a few base buttons back into alignment, created a washer out of stiff clear plastic, and screwed the elderly beast back together.
At this stage, even before I had tested it I was amazed with the results, all the slop in the centre zone had gone, and the movements on all axes were much more free. Letting go of the stick at any point shot it back to centre, and from the windows calibration ap, it looked like the centre stayed the same each time.

The real test was in firing up FS9 for a few minutes. Even in the Bell, which as you may note in earlier posts, I have been having endless trouble trying to keep steady, in a hover the nose of the heli pointed staight forward and only raised or lowered when I told it to. I drifted dorward at a very slow rate and was able to change this to a backward drift deliberately.*

I do need to check that in going back to the old stick that the sensitivities have not gone back to the default.

This is the link to the instructions for this repair.

[EDIT] I went back into FS9 and reset the sensitivities. The results are still incredible. I was able to make the smallest adjustments to my pitch with no problem at all.]]> Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:14:00 +1200 I spent a little time last night trying to hover the stock Bell again with fairly limited success. I may go back to my modified Bell and see if that behaves slightly better. One of the problems I have with the HUD is that you need to drag it up to be level with the horizon, but the horizon isn't always visible. Generally the instructions also fail to say which part of the HUD is supposed to be level, and finally, level with the collective full off, is different from level when you are close to lifting off.

At this stage I will keep tweaking and keep practicing and see how I go.
I have been busy with other things all day, and tonight isn't going to be much better so I am unsure when I can get some distraction free time.... and I thought I would have some time after the school holidays, heh.]]> Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:13:00 +1200
I have to say this flight was my best so far. My goals going into it, were to hover after lift off, move into forward flight with even airspeed and to maintain heading, and finally to hover again at the destination before touch down. These goals are pretty basic, but I figure ya gotta learn the basics first. The hover at each end was ok, better than anything I have managed in the past but not quite as good as the R22, but the big thing for me was i spent most of the flight on the right heading, within 1-2 degrees. Normally when I fly my heading is all over the place but the only times it got out of whack was where I had killed forward speed to climb over the many darned mountains in the way, heh.


On a side note, after speaking to creater2003 tonight I have a clearer idea of how I am going to make a collective lever. Talking to him tonight in the brand spanking new TS channel, he sent me the following link which is a variation of an idea I had seen for the 1st time earlier today. Just so happens I have a spare keypad lying around here somewhere. As I don't have a whizzy throttle quadrant like his, I'll probably also use the idea here, of using a brake cable assembly attatched to my trusty sidewinder.

For the pedals, I am vaguely considering something along the lines of the photo at the bottom of this page. I would probably be making something out of wood rather than metal though, and I'm a little stuck for ideas. I am also a little puzzled by the arm connecting the swivel to the potentiometer, as I would have thought that this could be done with a drive belt.]]> Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:54:00 +1200 I am going to be using this to store notes, or ideas, about the process of trying to learn how to fly a helicopter.

I have long held a fascination for these beasts and even considered trying to join the airforce as a kid, until I realised my math ability would let me down. I was also too short, and have a weird phobia about people shooting at me, so I never pursued that line very far. My entry into flightsims, and helicopters, was the old wireframe game tomahawk for the 48k spectrum. Rubber keys, and wireframes don't make the best way to learn to fly so I spent most of my time crashing near the home base.

When we got our first real pc in the days when windows 95 was being released, we also had ms flightsim (I have no idea what version). One brand new computer + a family of wannabe geeks = not much time any where near the computer, but I vaguely remember hours spent trying to land a boeing of some kind and being enormously happy with meself when I managed it*.

Since those days, all my PCs have been low spec and flight sims have been out of the question until now.

I recently upgraded, and started with FlightGear, but the battle to get the program running well, and with trying to get both joysticks working was terrible. I was constantly fighting with not enough knowledge on my part, and inconsistent and inaccurate (or perhaps just ambiguous) guides and 'howto' material. I managed to get the beast set up the way I wanted it and my first flight out of Wellington really blew my mind. Despite the somewhat crusty graphics, I flew from Wellington, out to Wainuiomata, over Lower Hutt, up over the Haywards and on to Kapiti by sight. Unfortunately, shortly after this I became frustrated with the lack of addon sceneries and graphics for the region, and with the lack of working helicopter models, so I ended up switching to FS9.

To be honest, my first flight in FS9 was a real dissapointment. I couldn't get the low RPM warning off the R22, and when I flew over Wainuiomata I could not tell the difference between it and Lower Hutt.
I perservered, and with the help of the freeware list from this site managed to get NZ looking pretty damned good. I have to say that in terms of freeware, the 75m mesh and landclass sceneries are essential. I would dearly love to have the Real NewZealand sceneries and the 20m mesh but these are out of my price range atm.

Since then I have done some reading on various sites and have tried and tried to learn to hover. I have downloaded a modified Bell206b and spend most of my practice time in this. Up until recently my results have been pretty darn dismal ... but in the last two days this has changed. more on this later. I fly a lot with my nextdoor neighbour over a LAN connection. We both got the sim at around the same time and while his interests are more in the big jet range, he has been very good about jumping into a heli. I have also participated in one multiplay session with fellow members of this forum and I don't think I caused too much mayhem despite the fact it took me forever to fly anywhere. My only defense is that I was giving them the pixie caramel treatment... 'While I'm flying there, they'll get tired of waiting and fall alseep!!!!'

My current directions or vague-ish goals are to build my own pedals (coz I cannot afford to buy any) and to make my own collective lever, which I have a few ideas about. While I would love to custom build pedals, collective, cyclic, a wee pedestal, a monitor to mock up a panel and a projector for the environment ... at this point I'll settle for the controls. At this point I am just contemplating design and my (lamentable lack of) engineering abilities.




*Once, as I recall]]> Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:27:00 +1200